#moon

www.universetoday.com

Smashed Icy Moons Cool Too Rapidly to Retain Oceans

There are more than 450 confirmed moons orbiting the eight major planets, but only a handful of them provide unique scientific value to pique the interests of the scientific community, specifically their potential for hosting life as we know it. This is due to the subsurface oceans that exist beneath icy crusts, including Jupiter’s Europa and Ganymede, and Saturn’s Enceladus. But what processes are responsible for producing these subsurface oceans, or potentially preventing them from forming in the first place? Now, an international team of scientists from NASA, the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel might be one step closer to solving this conundrum. In findings recently published in Nature Astronomy, the researchers used computer models to address a longstanding knowledge gap regarding how large impacts influence the formation and evolution of subsurface oceans on icy moons throughout the solar system. The researchers focused on the smaller moons of Saturn and Uranus, with Saturn hosting Enceladus, Titan, and Dione, and their potentially active subsurface oceans, while Uranus hosts Titania, Oberon, Ariel, Umbriel, and Miranda. All these Uranian moons are still being debated for either having active subsurface oceans or oceans that existed long and...