LONDON: Astronomers have found evidence that a large heavy ocean lies beneath the surface of Jupiter’s moon Ganymede. They had suspected for decades that a subterranean ocean may be found under the rocky mantle and icy crust of the largest moon in our solar system but they were not able to prove it until now.
A team of researchers that was using Hubble Telescope detected slight fluctuations in two bands of glowing aurorae in Ganymede’s atmosphere that, according to them, could occur only if the moon had a salty body of water.
“The solar system is now looking like a pretty soggy place,” said Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA. “The more we look at individual moons, the more we see that water is really in enormous abundance.”
“It’s like a lighthouse,” said Joachim Saur of the University of Cologne in Germany, who led the research.
Ganymede is the only moon present in the solar system that has its own magnetic field. However it is also affected by the magnetic field of Jupiter that is a giant planet the next door.
Effect of Jupiter’s magnetic field on Ganymede changes after every ten hours that is the length of time it usually takes the planet to make a full rotation on its axis. For five hours the magnetic field points towards Ganymede and for the next five hours it points away.
“We ran more than 100 models on supercomputers with different parameters, but every time we got the same result – with no ocean present the aurorae rock by six degrees, if you add an ocean it reduces the rock to two degrees,” Saur said at a news conference Thursday announcing the findings.
“Imagine a magnetically active star with a planet close by, by monitoring the auroral activity on that exoplanet we can infer the presence of water.” said Heidi Hammel, executive vice president of Assn. of Universities for Research in Astronomy.
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