agencies
Monday, February 06, 2023 02:00 PM
A new study showed that Saturn’s moon The little glacier, Mimas, may be a world with “hidden” oceans, according to RT.
It is believed that Mimas generates the right amount of heat to support subterranean ocean The most striking feature of its cratered surface, along with a lack of tectonic motion, is supported by recent simulations of the Moon’s Herschel Effect Basin, a small inner ocean surrounded by a thin ice crust, according to a statement from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI). in San Antonio, Texas.
Mimas is the smallest known astronomical body because it is still round in shape due to self-gravity, and the moon is also known as Saturn I, due to it being closest to the ringed planet.
And when we look at an object like Mimas, it is a cold and dead little rock, and some scientists call the moon “the scar” because of the very large crater that distinguishes its surface, which some likened to the “Death Star” in “Star Wars”.
“In the final days of NASA’s Cassini mission to Saturn, the spacecraft identified a strange jiggle, or wobble, in the rotation of Mimas, which often indicates a geologically active object,” said Alyssa Roden, co-author of the new study and a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute. able to support the internal environment.
However, despite this oscillation, Mimas’ highly cratered surface led scientists to initially consider the moon a frozen block of ice. That’s because most ocean worlds — like Enceladus, another of Saturn’s moons — tend to rift and show other signs of geological activity. However, Mimas lacks any telling tectonic features.
Scientists say the vibration / oscillation detected by Cassini indicates that the interior of Mimas is warm enough for a liquid ocean, but not so warm that it damages the moon’s thick crust of ice.
When modeling the formation of the Herschel Impact Basin, the scientists found that the Mimas ice crust must have been at least 34 miles (55 kilometers) thick at the time of the impact. Meanwhile, observations of Mimas and models of its internal heating indicate that its current ice sheet is less than 19 miles (30 km) thick, according to the statement.
These measurements show that an internal ocean has been warming and expanding since the formation of the basin. Furthermore, the scientists were only able to recreate the shape of the pelvis when analyzing the inner circumference into their models.
“We found that Herschel could not have formed into an ice crust of the current thickness without erasing the ice crust at the impact site,” Aden Denton, a study co-author and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Arizona, noted in the statement. If Mimas had an ocean today, it would have “The ice crust has been weak since Herschel’s formation, which may also explain the lack of cracks in Mimas. If Mimas is an emerging ocean world, this places important constraints on the formation, evolution and habitability of all of Saturn’s medium-sized moons.”
These new models challenge scientists’ current understanding of thermotropical evolution, Rhoden said in the statement.
And she continued: “It turns out that the surface of Mimas was deceiving us, and our new understanding has expanded the definition of a potentially habitable world in our solar system and beyond.”
