A new study by NASA said that some of Uranus' moons may have deep oceans lurking beneath their ice-capped surfaces. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration study also said that two of them namely Titania and Oberon may even have water warm enough to support life.
In all, at least 27 moons circle Uranus, with the four largest ranging from Ariel, at 720 miles (1,160 kilometres) across, to Titania, which is 980 miles (1,580 kilometres) across. Scientists have long thought that Titania, given its size, would be most likely to retain internal heat, caused by radioactive decay. The other moons had previously been widely considered too small to retain the heat necessary to keep an internal ocean from freezing, especially because heating created by the gravitational pull of Uranus is only a minor source of heat, the release by NASA said.
NASA also took to Twitter to post about their new findings. The caption reads, "I to the world am like a drop of water That in the ocean seeks another drop..." New NASA research suggests four of Uranus' largest moons, some named for Shakespeare characters, likely contain an ocean layer between their cores and icy crusts."
See the post here:
Published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, the new work could inform how a future mission might investigate the moons, but the paper also has implications that go beyond Uranus, said lead author Julie Castillo-Rogez of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
"When it comes to small bodies - dwarf planets and moons - planetary scientists previously have found evidence of oceans in several unlikely places, including the dwarf planets Ceres and Pluto, and Saturn's moon Mimas," she said. "So there are mechanisms at play that we don't fully understand. This paper investigates what those could be and how they are relevant to the many bodies in the solar system that could be rich in water but have limited internal heat."
The study revisited findings from NASA's Voyager 2 flybys of Uranus in the 1980s and from ground-based observations.
