Enceladus
/ɛnˈsɛlədəs/noun
A small icy moon of Saturn that vents plumes of water vapour from its south pole.
The Greek roots
Literally: “the noisy one”
The story of the word
Ἐγκέλαδος was a Giant crushed under Sicily when Athena threw the island on top of him, and the smoke of Etna is his breath escaping. The name looks built on κέλαδος, a din, which fits a buried giant. Herschel's 1847 naming scheme handed it to a small satellite of Saturn, and the Cassini spacecraft then found that satellite firing jets of salty water into space from cracks over a subsurface ocean, so a fire giant now labels one of the coldest and wettest places we know.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1847
Same family
In a sentence
Cassini flew straight through the plumes of Enceladus and tasted them.
Enceladus is the whitest object in the solar system, reflecting almost all the light that hits it.