The mission of the Cassini spacecraft which started in 2005, and remains on duty to this day, is quite a remarkable accomplishment. Cassini has gathered much needed direct observations which we can learn from. Water ice-jets which create ice grains escape the moon’s gravity providing material for one of Saturn’s rings.
What surprised scientists who believe in the solar system being billions of years old, was the fact that Enceladus is active, creating heat (5.8 gigawatts) where its supposed old age of billions of years should have frozen it out because of its long distance from the sun and as NASA points out, “Enceladus just doesn’t have the bulk needed for its interior to stay warm enough to maintain liquid water underground.”
Tidal heating became the only option for the source of the heat discovered on Encelaadus. And scientists have been trying to fit it into this theory ever since. Here is one of the tests…
“Scientists with the Cassini team created a map of the gravitational tidal stress on the moon’s icy crust and compared it to a map of the warm zones created using Cassini’s composite infrared spectrometer instrument (CIRS). Assuming the greatest stress is where the most friction occurs, and therefore where the most heat is released, areas with the most stress should overlap the warmest zones on the CIRS map.
“However, they don’t exactly match,” says Dr. Terry Hurford of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. “For example, in the fissure called the Damascus Sulcus, the area experiencing the greatest amount of shearing is about 50 kilometers (about 31 miles) from the zone of greatest heat.”
With this falsification, evolutionary scientists invoke a wobble that creates heat beyond what tidal heating does. The question I would pose to such a theory beyond the “wobble” would be, why are neighboring moons like Mimas which is bigger than Enceladus and endures more tidal stress than Enceladus is not active?
Back in January of 2010, evolutionary scientists from NASA tried math, and here is their conclusion…
“Calculations told scientists it would be impossible for Enceladus to have continually produced heat and gas at this rate. Tidal movement – the pull and push from Saturn as Enceladus moves around the planet – cannot explain the release of so much energy.”
Now what, try a different theoretical approach? Evolutionary scientists are in the business of preserving theories for as long as possible rather than proposing new ones, because many times it’s based on popularity among them and also where a pattern of funding for the research is plentiful. In a recent publication space.com which originated in Nature, we see Enceladus being fitted for a theory…
“Dione is pulling in a rhythmic way on Enceladus and preventing its orbit from circularizing, which it would otherwise do,” Spencer, who wrote a commentary in Nature about this research, said. “[Enceladus] is sometimes a bit closer to Saturn than at other times, and that means that the tidal stresses that Saturn imposes on Enceladus … are constantly varying, so Enceladus is continually being stretched and twisted by those forces, whereas if it were in a circular orbit, those forces would be constant and nothing would change.”
“These tidal forces could be responsible for heating up the interior of the moon, Spencer said. Tidal heating — the distortion of the moon’s shape that produces heat through friction — could be a reason for the moon’s warm interior, but that only explains part of the heat production.
“The amount of heat observed coming from Enceladus is larger than what scientists expect to observe theoretically, Spencer said.”
“There are certainly details to be worked out, but there is no other reason for Enceladus to be so extraordinary compared to its neighbors other than that it has tidal friction from Saturn’s tides that is heating the interior,” Spencer said. “We’ve known that for a long time, and this [research] is actually going to give us a nice handle on how that works because we’re directly seeing the effects of those tides.”
This is a typical problem with evolutionary research, they try and bluff their way through when their theory doesn’t match up with direct observations. Promising its readers it’s going to eventually be a scientific breakthrough. However, being fitted is one thing, but direct observations suggest, Enceladus is much younger than 4.5 billion years old and was designed by God!