Scientists have long suspected that Enceladus, Saturn’s sixth-largest moon, has an ocean sloshing between its rocky core and icy crust. Now NASA scientists say that they’ve confirmed that the ocean covers the entire moon.
A paper published this week in the journal Icarus used images from NASA’s Cassini orbiter to gather evidence of the massive sea. Scientists analyzed seven years of high-resolution images to track how the moon wobbles.
Based on that analysis, they’ve concluded that the moon’s ice crust must float freely from the core — which would be possible only if an ocean covered the entire world.
“This was a hard problem that required years of observations, and calculations involving a diverse collection of disciplines, but we are confident we finally got it right,” said Peter Thomas, a Cassini imaging team member at Cornell University and lead author of the new paper.
Previous research has suggested that the moon has the kind of geological activity necessary for the evolution of life.
