A moon's icy spray.At Yellowstone National Park Yellowstone National Park, 2,219,791 acres (899,015 hectares), the world's first national park (est. 1872), NW Wyo., extending into Montana and Idaho. It lies mainly on a broad plateau in the Rocky Mts., on the Continental Divide, c. in Wyoming, geysers The examples and perspective in this USA may not represent a worldwide view of the subject. Please [ improve this article] or discuss the issue on the talk page. This is an alphabetical list of notable geysers, a type of erupting hot spring: Old Faithful well-known geyser in Yellowstone Park; erupts every 64.5 minutes. [Am. Hist.: NCE, 3023] See : Punctuality regularly spout water hundreds of feet into the air. The jets are impressive, but they're nothing compared to geysers on one of Saturn's moons. The tiny moon, called Enceladus, measures just 300 kilometers (186 miles) across. Recent pictures of areas near the moon's south pole South Pole, southern end of the earth's axis, lat. 90° S. It is distinguished from the south magnetic pole. The South Pole was reached by Roald Amundsen, a Norwegian explorer, in 1911. See Antarctica. show that icy geysers shoot up another 300 kilometers, as high as the moon is wide. The images came from the Cassini spacecraft, which has been on tour around Saturn and its many moons since July 2004. Last July, instruments on Cassini detected a large cloud of water vapor floating above the southern polar region of Enceladus. At the time, astronomers suspected that breaks in the moon's surface allowed ice to vaporize va·por·ize v. To convert or be converted into a vapor. Vaporize To dissolve solid material or convert it into smoke or gas. and fuel the cloud. The new images give a more specific idea of how that might happen. They also prove that the moon is geologically active. Scientists are giddy with the discovery. "There is little that can compare to the sighting of activity on another solar system body," says Carolyn Porco. "This has been a heart-stopper." Porco is the Cassini imaging team leader at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.--E. Sohn http://www.sciencenewsforkids.org/articles/20060111/Note3.asp |
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