Hidden depths
Slight adjustments within the orbit of Saturn’s moon Mimas trace on the presence of an unlimited, younger ocean underneath the satellite tv for pc’s icy floor that can have shaped between 5 million and 50 million years in the past, Adam Mann reported in “This Saturn moon might harbor water” (SN: 3/9/24, p. 8).
Reader Bobby Baum requested how the sea shaped so lately and whether or not an ocean will have shaped more than one instances up to now.
Saturn’s moons gravitationally have interaction with one every other and with their ringed mother or father planet as they orbit. This complicated dance reasons tidal stresses at the moons, producing warmth that may soften a satellite tv for pc’s icy internal.
The putative ocean underneath Mimas’ floor more than likely shaped on account of such an interplay with no less than one of the crucial different Saturnian moons within the fresh previous, says Valéry Lainey, an astronomer on the Paris Observatory. “We have no idea but which [other] moon is liable for this, however such interactions are quite common in celestial mechanics,” Lainey says.
The subsurface ocean more than likely didn’t exist previous in Mimas’ historical past, Lainey and co-workers suspect. That’s since the crew has now not observed any proof of floor deformations {that a} thick, liquid ocean would have brought about.
Youngsters’ creations?
Radiocarbon relationship means that historical cave art work in Argentina are just about 8,200 years previous. That age means that the area’s rock artwork custom, which more than likely preserved cultural wisdom shared via hunter-gatherers, is a number of millennia older than earlier proof suggests, Bruce Bower reported in “Patagonian cave stored tradition alive” (SN: 3/9/24, p. 16).
Reader Joan questioned if youngsters, somewhat than adults, will have created the traditional artwork. “I regularly had my youngsters draw and paint when they may now not play outdoor. If I used to be caught in a cave with my youngsters, they’d had been portray at the partitions,” Joan wrote.
“There is not any option to know evidently who made those cave art work,” Bower says. Some researchers have lengthy suspected that Stone Age youngsters and youths used their arms to provoke line patterns on cave partitions, in addition to depart at the back of kid- and teen-sized hand stencils inside of caves (SN: 4/28/07, p. 264). “If younger other folks made some or the entire cave art work in Argentina, they participated in what could have been a device for transmitting cultural wisdom that lasted over 3,000 years,” Bower says.