• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Even Uranus Might Be Hiding An Ocean World

October 31, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Ocean worlds, such as Europa around Jupiter and Enceladus around Saturn, are recent and fascinating discoveries. These moons hide, far beneath their icy crusts, a deep liquid ocean. Other moons and dwarf planets also hide liquid oceans underneath, and the latest candidate is Miranda – the smallest of Uranus’s five round moons.

Miranda might be the smallest round object in the Solar System. It has a diameter of just 470 kilometers (290 miles). Its surface area is just about the area of Texas. Still, it is a complex world. Its surface is among the most extreme we have observed anywhere and features the tallest cliff in the Solar System: Verona Rupes, which has a drop of about 20 kilometers (12 miles). An equivalent cliff on Earth would have to be over 270 kilometers tall.

Advertisement

It was these and many other interesting features that suggested the presence of an ocean. Once the surface structures are plugged into computer models, the enigmatic geology is best matched by the presence of a vast ocean that formed between 100 and 500 million years ago.

“To find evidence of an ocean inside a small object like Miranda is incredibly surprising,” co-author Tom Nordheim, from Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), said in a statement. “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.”

The ocean would be at least 100 kilometers (62 miles deep) under a crust of no more than 30 kilometers (19 miles). Given the small size of the moon, the ocean would occupy half of its total volume.

The team believed it formed due to a gravitational resonance with another moon, squishing Miranda until its interior got warm enough to liquefy. The cosmic dance is not over, but the ocean has not completely frozen over. If it had, there would be cracks on the surface: water ice has a larger volume than liquid water. If Miranda has a truly liquid ocean, it would be truly remarkable.

Advertisement



That alone would warrant a mission there, as we discussed with Professor Brian Cox a few weeks back. There is so much more to the ice giants, Uranus and Neptune, that we do not know.  

The study is published in The Planetary Science Journal.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Cricket-Manchester test likely to be postponed after India COVID-19 case
  2. EU to attend U.S. trade meeting put in doubt by French anger
  3. Soccer-West Ham win again, Leicester and Napoli falter
  4. Was Jesus A Hallucinogenic Mushroom? One Scholar Certainly Thought So

Source Link: Even Uranus Might Be Hiding An Ocean World

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Humans’ Hidden “Sixth Sense” To Be Mapped Following $14.2 Million Prize – What Is Interoception?
  • Purple Earth Hypothesis: Our Planet Was Not Blue And Green Over 2.4 Billion Years Ago
  • Hippos Hung Around In Europe 80,000 Years Later Than We Thought
  • Officially Gone: Slender-Billed Curlew, Once-Widespread Migratory Bird, Declared Extinct By IUCN
  • Watch: Rare Footage Captures Freaky Faceless Cusk Eels Lurking On The Deep-Sea Floor
  • Watch This Funky Sea Pig Dancing Its Way Through The Deep Sea, Over 2,300 Meters Below The Surface
  • NASA Lets YouTuber Steve Mould Test His “Weird Chain Theory” In Space
  • The Oldest Stalagmite Ever Dated Was Found In Oklahoma Rocks, Dating Back 289 Million Years
  • 2024’s Great American Eclipse Made Some Birds Behave In Surprising Ways, But Not All Were Fooled
  • “Carter Catastrophe”: The Math Equation That Predicts The End Of Humanity
  • Why Is There No Nobel Prize For Mathematics?
  • These Are The Only Animals Known To Incubate Eggs In Their Stomachs And Give “Birth” Out Their Mouths
  • Constipated? This One Fruit Could Help, Says First-Ever Evidence-Led Diet Guidance
  • NGC 2775: This Galaxy Breaks The Rules Of “Galactic Evolution” And Baffles Astronomers
  • Meet The “Four-Eyed” Hirola, The World’s Most Endangered Antelope With Fewer Than 500 Left
  • The Bizarre 1997 Experiment That Made A Frog Levitate
  • There’s A Very Good Reason Why October 1582 On Your Phone Is Missing 10 Days
  • Skynet-1A: Military Spacecraft Launched 56 Years Ago Has Been Moved By Persons Unknown
  • There’s A Simple Solution To Helping Avoid Erectile Dysfunction (But You’re Not Going To Like It)
  • Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS May Be 10 Billion Years Old, This Rare Spider Is Half-Female, Half-Male Split Down The Middle, And Much More This Week
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version