Mysterious blood red streak on Saturn's moon

The origin of the blood-red streaks across the surface of Saturn's moon Tethys remains a mystery to scientists.

According to National Geographic, Tethys is one of Saturn's seven major moons 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, the surface of Tethys also has curved blood-red streaks that are several kilometers wide and hundreds of kilometers long.

Mysterious blood-red streaks on the surface of Tethys. Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI.

"We don't yet understand the blood-red streaks that appear on the surface of the moon Tethys," Paul Schenk, a doctoral student at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, said at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union on December 15.

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft discovered the red streaks in April 2004. The initial images NASA captured were quite blurry. But after the spacecraft’s flight last November, scientists were able to observe them more clearly.

"We don't see any signs of mountains or geological changes," Schenk said. This means that the red streaks are not related to the terrain here. In addition, scientists have discovered strange dark matter inside nearby craters. They have not been able to explain the origin of this material or its influence on the red streaks.

When Schenk mapped the red streaks on Tethys’s surface, he realized that the model suggested that the moon could be deformed by extreme stresses such as an irregular orbit or a shift in the poles. But simulations of these processes did not produce terrain that matched the location of the streaks.

The red streaks are relatively new. Normally, dust in Saturn’s E ring and charged particles from space would erase the streaks. But they persist, and even appear on the Odysseus crater, which is more than two billion years old, according to Schenk’s estimates.

Schenk's most plausible hypothesis is that the red streaks are related to cracks forming or recently activating on Saturn's surface that the Cassini spacecraft couldn't image clearly. These new cracks reveal a material that is completely different from the ice found elsewhere on the moon's surface.

According to VnExpress