Saturn's moon may be brewing chemistry under its ice — slowly

New lab experiments by Yasuhito Sekine's team at Tokyo's Earth-Life Science Institute show that ocean droplets from Enceladus freeze slowly as they rise through the moon's icy vents, letting salts separate into wildly different ice grains — exactly what NASA's Cassini saw spraying from the moon's south pole. The result, published in Science Advances, means the salty ocean beneath may be cooking up far more complex chemistry than anyone assumed. Life's ingredients, sorted by ice.