The Saturn moon Enceladus harbors a big ocean of liquid water beneath its icy crust that may be capable of supporting life as we know it, a new study reports.
The water ocean on Enceladus is about 6 miles (10 kilometers) deep and lies beneath a shell of ice 19 to 25 miles (30 to 40 km) thick, researchers said. Further, it's in direct contact with a rocky seafloor, theoretically making possible all kinds of complex chemical reactions -- such as, perhaps, the kind that led to the rise of life on Earth.
"The main implication is that there are potentially habitable environments in the solar system in places which are completely unexpected," study lead author Luciano Iess said in a video about the discovery produced by his home institution, Sapienza University in Rome. "Enceladus has a surface temperature of about minus 180 degrees Celsius [minus 292 degrees Fahrenheit], but under that surface there is liquid water."
The team's calculations suggest that the moon's ocean covers at least as much area as Lake Superior, the second-largest lake on Earth -- though the icy moon's sea is much deeper than Lake Superior and thus holds a great deal more water.
The ocean is likely confined to the moon's southern hemisphere, reaching halfway to the equator or so from the pole. But the study team cannot rule out the possibility that it extends globally, said co-author Dave Stevenson of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
The subsurface sea probably feeds Enceladus' geysers, which blast organic compounds -- the carbon-containing building blocks of life as we know it -- into space along with ice and water vapor. [
Enceladus' Surprising Geysers (Video)]
