James Webb Space Telescope Feed Post

Water emission is observed across the whole field of view, revealing an immense water plume emanating from Enceladus which is feeding an extended background torus around Saturn

a) The observations sample the trailing hemisphere of Enceladus and the edge of the torus, where RS refers to the mean radius of Saturn. b) At each spaxel (0.1"x0.1"), the H2O column density was retrieved from the observed molecular fluorescence emissions in the 2.62 to 2.72 µm range. Enceladus is 0.07" in diameter (smaller than a spaxel), and the continuum image of the Point-Spread-Function (PSF) is shown in the inset box. Some residual diagonal striping is observed, which we suspect originates from detector effects. c) A model with two components as shown in Figure 1b, consisting of a plume and a torus background emission, reproduce the observations well. d) A residual image was computed by subtracting the outgassing model from the observations, revealing a close fit to the data