Ocean discovered inside Saturn’s moon Mimas

Astronomers have discovered evidence of a subsurface ocean under the icy abyss of Saturn’s mini moon, Mimas, which resembles the Star Wars Death Star. 

After using observations from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft and studying changes in Mimas‘s orbit, the French team shared on Wednesday that a secret ocean 12 to 18 miles beneath the frozen surface was more likely to be there than an assumed rocky core.

This Feb. 13, 2010, image provided by NASA shows Saturn’s moon Mimas and its large Herschel Crater, captured by the Cassini spacecraft. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute via AP) The study was published in the journal Nature.

The only substances to have ever been detected on Mimas are water and ice. With its 123-mile radius, Mimas is Saturn’s smallest and innermost moon, and due to its tiny size, it does not hold a round enough shape to look like a typical moon.  

But its most peculiar attribute is a gargantuan impact crater, which is the second largest of any moon in the universe. Given the name Herschel, after the moon’s discoverer, the crater is 80 miles wide, as far as one-third across the face of the far side of the moon. 

“Mimas was probably the most unlikely place to look for a global ocean — and liquid water more generally,” Valery Lainey of the Paris Observatory said. “So that looks like a potentially habitable world. But nobody knows how much time is needed for life to arise.”

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Believed to be less than 25 million years old, the subterranean ocean, which fills almost half of Mimas’s volume, could have a warm temperature at the seafloor despite its ice-cold surface, according to Lainey.

This June 2023 image provided by the Space Telescope Science Institute shows the planet Saturn and three of its moons, from left, Enceladus, Tethys, and Dione, captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (NASA, ESA, CSA, JWST Saturn Team via AP) The Earth’s moon is about 2,000 times bigger than Mimas.  

William Herschel discovered Mimas in 1789 using a 40-foot telescope. The moon was named after a Greek mythological giant killed by Mars in a battle.