Mysterious red streaks on Saturn moon

The origin of the blood-red objects slipping across the moon's surface of Saturn's Tethys is still a mystery to challenge scientists.

According to National Geographic, Tethys is one of the seven major moons of Saturn and is composed mainly of ice. Its surface is quite similar to other moons in the outer solar system. It has many craters and cracks. In addition, Tethys surface also appears red blood streaks several kilometers wide and hundreds of kilometers long.

"We do not understand the red blood streaks that appear on the surface of the Tethys moon , " said Paul Schenk, Ph.D. from the Planetary and Moon Institute, speaking at the American Geophysical Association's annual meeting on Thursday. /twelfth.

Mysterious red streaks on Tethys surface.(Photo: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SSI).

The Cassini spacecraft of NASA discovered the red streaks in April 2004. The original images that NASA obtained are quite fuzzy. But after the ship's flight last November, scientists have a clearer view of them.

"We do not see any trace of hills or geological changes," Schenk said. This means these red streaks are not related to the terrain here. Besides, scientists also discovered strange dark matter inside the nearby craters . They have not been able to give an explanation of the origin of that material as well as their influence on these red streaks.

When Schenk mapped the red streaks on the Tethys surface, he realized the model showed that the moon could be deformed under great pressure such as abnormal motion trajectories or the movement of two poles. But simulating the above processes creates terrain that matches the location of red streaks.

Odysseus giant hole on Tethys is 450km wide and 10km deep.(Photo: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SSI).

Traces of these red streaks are relatively new. Normally, dust in Saturn's E belt and charged particles from space will erase the streaks. But they still exist and even appear on the mouth of Odysseus more than two billion years ago according to Schenk's estimate.

The most reasonable hypothesis Schenk suggests is that these red streaks are related to newly formed or activated cracks on Saturn's surface that the Cassini spacecraft cannot capture. These new cracks reveal a different form of material than ice in the rest of the satellite surface.