MEXICO: Oceans trapped under ice appear to be pretty common in the solar system and one of them, on a small moon of Saturn’s, appears to be quite hot.
This week in the journal Nature, an international team of scientists reported evidence for hydrothermal vents on the Saturnian moon Enceladus, with temperatures of its rocky core surpassing 194 degrees Fahrenheit (90 degrees Celsius) in spots. The discovery, if confirmed, would make Enceladus the only place other than Earth where such chemical reactions between rock and heated water are known to be occurring today and for many scientists, it would make Enceladus a most promising place to look for life.
“The most surprising part is the high temperature,” said Hsiang-Wen Hsu, a scientist at the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics and lead author of the paper. “But that’s the number we could derive.”
Meanwhile, in a paper published Thursday in The Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, another team reported signs of another under-ice ocean, on Ganymede, the largest of Jupiter’s moons. Scientists are already convinced that there is a large ocean, also covered by ice, on another Jovian moon, Europa. NASA’s Galileo spacecraft had also found hints of hidden water on Ganymede and on another of Jupiter’s moons, Callisto.
The new research, using the Hubble Space Telescope, fits with the earlier hints. “This is now stronger evidence for an ocean,” said Joachim Saur, a professor of geophysics at the University of Cologne in Germany and the lead author of the Ganymede paper.
