Emily Chan
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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