The moon is deceptive.
The small moon is covered in an 80 mile wide crater that looks like a Star Wars Death Star space station. Mimas looks like a frozen chunk of ice.
Evidence for sub- surface oceans can be found in the cracked surfaces of other moons, like Jupiter's Europa and Enceladus. Mimas does not offer any hints of an ocean.
There is an engine in the moons of Enceladus and Europa, according to a planetary scientist. It can't possibly be an ocean world when you look at Mimas.
Rhoden thought so. Looks are not what they appear to be.
Rhoden and her co-author describe how they found evidence for an ocean beneath Mimas' icy shell. The moon might not be a frozen chunk of ice.
There is a giant crater on the moon. It's called the Herschel crater. Credit: NASA, JPL, and Space Science Institute.
The water ice on Enceladus was captured by the Cassini spacecraft. Credit: NASA, JPL, and Space Science Institute.
Mimas has an attribute that could allow it to harbor an ocean. It gets tugged and stretched as it swings close to the powerful force of the planet and then goes farther away. It takes 22 hours and 36 minutes to do each orbit. This process creates a lot of heat in ocean worlds.
Rhoden, a principal scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, followed up on an earlier observation of a tiny wobble in Mimas' orbit. An icy sea could cause this wobble. Is it possible that tidal heating melted enough ice to create a sea? The ocean would freeze if there was too much heat and too little heat.
If there was an ocean inside Mimas large enough to cause its wobble, the water would be beneath an icy shell that was 14 to 20 miles thick. They ran simulations of how the ice on Mimas would be impacted by tidal heating. The ocean was under 14 to 20 miles of solid ice.
Rhoden said they came up with the right number.
Rhoden emphasizes that this is almost certain proof that Mimas harbors an ocean. There is compelling evidence that an ocean could exist.
There are a lot of different ways life can be.
We know that the oceans are full of life. NASA says water is at the top of the list of ingredients that make life possible. There's still no evidence of life outside Earth, but tidal heating may allow life to thrive. The moon's rocky interior, ice shell, and ocean could be used to create a watery environment rich with chemistry.
Sometimes the search for life is narrowed down to "habitable zones" in solar systems, which are the relatively narrow regions where liquid water could exist on a planet's surface. The solar system's habitable zone contains Earth.
The planets are outside of the habitable zone in the icy regions of our solar system. These worlds have oceans. Life may have arisen there.
Rhoden saidHabitability is not one swath of a solar system. There are a lot of different ways life can be.
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