Uranus’ Moon May Have A Liquid Ocean Beneath Its Icy Surface, Making It A Possible Target In The Search For Extraterrestrial Life

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One of Uranus’ moons, Miranda, could have a liquid ocean beneath its icy surface that might even harbor extraterrestrial life.

If so, this would place Miranda among the few worlds in our solar system with an environment that can sustain life. It would also challenge many assumptions that have been made about the moon’s history and composition.

“To find evidence of an ocean inside a small object like Miranda is incredibly surprising,” Tom Nordheim, a co-author of the study and planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, said.

“It helps build on the story that some of these moons at Uranus may be really interesting—that there may be several ocean worlds around one of the most distant planets in our solar system, which is both exciting and bizarre.”

Uranus has 28 moons that scientists know about, and almost all of them are named after characters from the works of William Shakespeare and Alexander Pope.

Miranda is one of the smallest of Uranus’ large moons. It measures about 290 miles in diameter and is roughly one-seventh the size of Earth’s moon. Miranda is believed to be composed primarily of water ice mixed with rock, much like the majority of Uranus’ moons.

Due to its strange geological structures, Miranda stands out from the rest of the moons in our solar system. In 1986, the Voyager 2 captured images of Miranda’s southern hemisphere.

The terrain in that area consisted of huge canyons, cliff faces, ridges, and craters that resemble squares on a quilt. It is suspected that these features were formed as a result of tidal forces and internal heating.

A team of researchers wanted to figure out exactly how Miranda developed its current terrain. To do so, they analyzed the Voyager 2 images and reverse-engineered the surface features to see what the moon’s interior structure must have been and how it responded to tidal forces.

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After mapping the cracks, ridges, and other characteristics on Miranda, the team developed a computer model to test what the moon’s interior might have looked like.

The most likely scenario that would’ve led to Miranda’s appearance required the existence of a vast underground ocean between 100 million and 500 million years ago.

The subsurface ocean would’ve filled almost half of the moon’s body and would’ve been at least 62 miles deep, hidden beneath an icy crust that was 19 miles thick.

According to the researchers, the key to the ocean’s creation had to be the tidal forces between Miranda and nearby moons. These gravitational interactions can be strengthened if the moons orbit a planet at a certain rate.

The tidal forces from these orbits create friction and heat up the inside of moons, melting ice into liquid water. The process is thought to be why Jupiter’s moon, Europa, has an ocean beneath its surface.

By now, the moons of Uranus have probably fallen out of the orbital patterns that would have created Miranda’s ocean, meaning that the ocean must have frozen quite a bit.

However, the researchers don’t think the ocean is completely frozen yet. There may still be some liquid water inside the moon.

One day, Miranda could be a target for the search for extraterrestrial life, but for now, more research needs to be done to confirm the ocean’s existence and if it’s still liquid.

The study was published in the Planetary Science Journal.

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