Astronomers believe that there's a strong possibility that life could exist on the icy Saturn's moon called Enceladus. This is due to several findings pointing out at several organic molecules and icy crystals. See the image that made NASA and the astronomers believe after the jump!

NASA's Cassini spacecraft was recently given the task of investigating the plumes of water vapor and ice crystals found erupting from the South Pole of Saturn's Enceladus. Any information gathered from this latest space mission will look into the nature of this strange phenomenon, as well as the possibility of the tiny moon being able to sustain life. More details about this in our full article.

The image you see to the left is not a flying saucer. It's actually one of Saturn's moons that looks eerily like a UFO. Recent pictures show that Saturn has two of these moons and computer simulations indicate that they may have accumulated their rings by gathering debris from Saturn's own enigmatic ring. You'd think Saturn had had enough rings. More details, and a video of how these moves may have formed in the full article.

It has long since been a theory that the rings of Saturn are the remains of a shattered moon. What's in question is how one of the farther rings remains there since nothing seems to be keeping it there.

Objects escape their orbits depending on the circumstances. Our moon will escape the Earth's orbit someday, but it's way too big so it won't be leaving us for a few billion years. One of the farther Saturn rings, the G ring, is only made up of small particles so it should dissipate over time. But it doesn't... which brings up the question of why.

Recently the spacecraft Cassini, the same one that discovered Saturn's 60th moon, discovered what might be the source of the ring: a small portion along the inner edge of the ring is made up of chunks of debris that would form a moon about 100-meters in diameter. The debris is believed to be the remains of a dead moon. It's what feeds the G ring its supply of dust as it breaks down from being hit by micrometeorites.

Scientists also believe that the G ring's orbit around Saturn is also being maintained by one of its 60 moons, Mimas, which helps keep it in place. Scientists believe that the ring won't last very long though. Once that portion of debris runs out of particles, that's one less ring for Saturn.

The spacecraft Cassini, which is part of the Cassini-Huygens mission launched back in 1997, has discovered the 60th satellite of the planet Saturn while taking snapshot images of the planet in orbit.

Based from initial observations, the new moon is around two kilometers wide and lies between two other moons Methone and Pallene. Because of the new moon's proximity to Methone and Pallene, scientists are thinking that the three actually compose a family of satellites.

Cassini Imaging Team scientist Professor Carl Murray from Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) had this to say,

After initially detecting this extremely faint object, we carried out an exhaustive search of all Cassini images to date and were able to find further detections. The Saturnian system continues to amaze and intrigue us with many hidden treasures being discovered the more closely we look.

Murray added that their team will further use Cassini's cameras to look for other "family members" as well as other satellites orbiting Saturn. Currently, the new moon is dubbed as "Frank" but the official name will be decided later on by the International Astronomical Union.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has been studying the planet Saturn and its moons for some time now, bringing strange and stranger news to the waiting scientists back on earth.

Only recently they found another weird fact from the sixth rock from the sun: Saturn's polar vortex, the winds that blow outward from its polar region, is hexagon-shaped rather than circular like the polar vortex we have here on earth.

The strange vortex features a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides. Scientists are baffled. They've never seen anything like it on any other planet. And to think that Saturn is a planet whose thick atmosphere is dominated by circularly-shaped waves and connective cells; it's the last place to ever expect such a six-sided geometric figure.

Two decades ago, this same feature on Saturn's north pole was photographed by NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts. The fact that this hexagon appeared again in the Cassini images means that it's a long-lived feature. After 15 years - the length of a long polar night in Saturn - the image is made visible again. It's been said that four earths could fit inside this hexagon, measuring 15,000 miles across.

Another weird thing about Saturn: while it has a hexagon-shaped polar vortex on its north pole, the southern polar vortex looks a lot different. It appears to be a hurricane with a giant eye. Such weird facts about the Solar System's second largest planet only serve to whet our scientists' appetites to learn more about it.

They believe that once they understand the nature of the "bizarre hexagon", the may learn of the true rotation rate of the deep atmosphere and perhaps the interior of the planet.

New radar images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which is currently orbiting the Saturn moon Titan, provide new evidence of seas that could be the largest liquid formations reported on the planet's surface. Cassini's instruments have picked up these dark features near Titan's north pole, and one amazing feature is that one of the larger dark areas have been measured to be approximately 100,000 square kilometers (39,000 square miles) - out-sizing America's Lake Superior, which stands at 82,414 square kilometers (31,820 square miles). The image on the left shows this comparison.

"We've long hypothesized about oceans on Titan and now with multiple instruments we have a first indication of seas that dwarf the lakes seen previously," said Dr. Jonathan Lunine, Cassini interdisciplinary scientist at the University of Arizona, Tucson.

It is hypothesized that these seas are composed of methane and ethane - the most abundant gas in Titan's clouds and atmosphere - which have been condensed into liquid form due the much colder polar temperatures on Saturn. At the moment, however, these formations are yet to be verified as liquid-filled by the Cassini-Hyugens team.

Meanwhile, the image on the right shows a similar and much larger dark feature that was captured by Cassini's imaging cameras. According to NASA's reports, this dark area stretches for more than 1,000 kilometers (620 miles). If verified to be liquid-filled, this other sea will stand to be almost as large as the Earth's Caspian Sea which measures 3,626,000 square kilometers (1,400,000 square miles).

Further Cassini flybys are being planned for the dark areas in May to verify if these formations are indeed liquid-filled.

Here on Earth, the common notion is that a lake is a body of water surrounded entirely by land. But imagine a lake on Saturn's largest moon, the Titan. The planet itself being so far away from the Sun, it comes as no surprise that the temperature there would be much lower. On Titan, it is 90 degrees Kelvin, in fact.

Surely, this has an effect on the kind of elements present there. If you are to think that nothing else but a body of water can be a lake, then you are highly mistaken. Because on Titan, over 75 lakes ranging in size from about a mile and a half to 40 miles across have been detected, and they are not filled with water. Instead, cradled in the lakes as liquid is methane. Here on Earth, it is a form of gas. But out there, it's clearly liquid.

Dr. Ellen Stofan of the Proxemy Research in Washington DC, as well as a member of the Cassini Radar team explains this as being caused by the really low temperature on the moon. They also believe that the lakes have another kind of hydrocarbon compound of some sorts in them, called ethane.

Interestingly enough, although the chemistry is apparently different on Titan, the lakes' behaviour do resemble their Earthly counterparts. Says Stofan, "The methane-ethane would become transparent, the way water is on Earth, it would be behaving like water, the lakes could have small waves on the surfaces." What also got them into thinking that these are, in fact, lakes is the way that other channels feed into then, their shapes, shorelines, and all of those geological aspects of the lake.

The team's discovery is featured in this week's journal "Nature".

It appears as though it isn't only the rings of Saturn that are a sight to behold. Images were released last Thursday of a huge vortex by the planet's South Pole. The image, taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, shows the first storm of its kind documented on another planet.

Running for about 350 miles per hour, the winds blow steadily around the eye of the storm. That's definitely some strong winds right there. Here on Earth, a hurricane containing more than 156 miles per hour would already be in Category Five. Saturn's Storm, however, is undoubtedly much, much stronger than those we experience her. And with a diameter of about 5,000 miles, with clouds casting a shadow in the center of the vortex extending from 20 to 45 miles above the surface, we can tell you right now, we sure aren't envious of Saturn.

More images and info on the storm after the jump!

The next time you start asking about how life on Earth started out, don't be surprised if researchers don't talk about their most recent archaeological dig, but instead say something in the lines of looking to the heavens. Naah, they haven't turned to Astrology.

We've already mentioned in an earlier article that it's been recently discovered that Titan, one of Saturn's moons, has large methane deposits circulating in a very similar manner as the winds and rivers on Earth. It turns out that organic particles, created by sunlight interacting with the Titan's methane-laden atmosphere, may provide clues to what earth was like 3.6 billion years ago, when primitive life was only beginning to exist.

Taking a cure from this recent observation by the NASA-ESA Cassini-Huygens mission, scientist Margaret Tolbert and her colleagues over at the University of Colorado pulled off this experiment to replicate the conditions that occur on Titan. They irradiated a methane cloud with UV rays, and then injected it with CO2 gas to see what would happen. Sure enough, the resulting reaction created a haze of organic molecules very similar to that on Titan - molecules that were digestible for early life on earth.

"That would have been a food source for any budding life," Tolbert said regarding the results. "And it would have been, importantly, a global food source. And so life, instead of being confined to certain very special environments, could have thrived in every puddle."