Saturn’s Moon Mimas: Discovery of Hidden Liquid Water Beneath Its Icy Surface
Explore the groundbreaking discovery of a subsurface ocean on Saturn’s moon Mimas, revealing new insights into celestial bodies with hidden liquid water beneath icy shells.
Mimas, one of Saturn’s moons, strikingly resembles the iconic “Death Star” from the Star Wars saga.
The Cassini spacecraft, launched in 1997 to study Saturn and its moons, detected subtle oscillations in Mimas’s axis just before ending its mission in 2017. Scientists at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado analyzed this libration and proposed the existence of a subsurface ocean beneath Mimas’s icy crust.
This liquid water is believed to be sustained by tidal heating—deformations caused by Saturn’s powerful gravitational pull on the much smaller moon.
To put it in perspective, Mimas has a diameter of about 400 kilometers and a mass of approximately 3.7×1019 kilograms, whereas Saturn’s diameter spans roughly 116,000 kilometers with a mass around 5.7×1026 kilograms.
Saturn’s immense gravity periodically distorts Mimas’s surface. However, such forces would typically smooth out surface irregularities, including the massive Herschel crater that gives Mimas its Death Star-like appearance.
Researchers modeled how Saturn’s gravity affects Mimas’s internal structure and icy shell, concluding that both the presence of large craters and a subsurface ocean can coexist if the ice shell is between 20 and 32 kilometers thick.
Within Mimas, enough internal heat remains to keep salty water in liquid form beneath the ice, while major surface features stay intact and no cracks form in the ice shell.
Should further evidence confirm liquid water on Mimas, it could redefine a new category of celestial bodies—those without obvious surface signs of oceans like cracks, but which reveal internal geological activity through libration and other astronomical measurements.
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