Researchers have found that rifts on Saturn's icy, ocean-harboring moon Enceladus, might be giving rise to curtains of vapor and ice miles high and hundreds of miles long. The scientists determined through the new study that what appeared as discrete geysers on Enceladus might have been optical illusions of these much broader curtain eruptions.

Researchers thought years ago that Enceladus - Saturn's sixth-largest moon, a 310-mile-wide (500 kilometers) satellite coated with an icy shell – was cold and had no geological activity. But the belief was debunked by NASA's Cassini spacecraft in 2005 as spotted water vapor and icy particles erupting from the moon.

Scientists then figured out that four tiger stripes caused these outbursts. The stripes are rifts on Enceladus' south pole named after the cities Alexandria, Baghdad, Cairo and Dam. A network of cracks is likely to carry water up from a giant subsurface ocean.

Planetary scientist Joseph Spitale, of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, and his colleagues, were initially thinking that these eruptions were concentrated jets, but they have now found evidence that these explosions may actually be giant curtains of vapor and ice.

“What became evident very quickly was that a lot of the tiny little jets we looked at were real slippery — we couldn't triangulate them. We also saw really broad areas of emissions that couldn't be jets — they were just huge fuzz”, said Spitale.

The researchers reached at the conclusion after analyzing Cassini images of what they thought were jets from Enceladus. The study helped them understand where these eruptions came from and what the likely cause behind them was.

Spitale said most of the fractures on Enceladus appeared turned on in five snapshots taken during a one-year period across 2009 and 2010. They were seen emitting at some level all the time.