American scientists have demonstrated that the three “ice hells” that NASA plans to send a spacecraft to study may harbor subsurface oceans teeming with life.
A new study from the Institute of Geophysics at the University of Texas and the University of California, Santa Cruz, indicates that the three frigid worlds named Miranda, Ariel, and Umbriel may possess warm subsurface oceans and extraterrestrial life.
Miranda, Ariel, and Umbriel are three icy moons of Uranus, named after characters in the plays of the renowned English playwright William Shakespeare.
According to Sci-News, when NASA’s Voyager 2 flew past Uranus in 1986, it captured grainy images of the large, ice-covered moons.
Currently, NASA is planning to send another spacecraft to Uranus, specially equipped to investigate whether the moons of this distant planet conceal liquid water oceans.
Uranus and its moons – (Photo: BBC SKY AND NIGHT MAGAZINE).
Uranus is very far from the Sun, which means that its surface, along with its satellites, is extremely cold, making it hard for life to exist.
However, if subsurface oceans exist, the outer ice shell would act as an excellent insulator. Moreover, to have liquid water, a heat source is required to warm the water, similar to the hydrothermal systems at the bottom of Earth’s oceans, where life can emerge and thrive.
NASA’s mission is still in the early planning stages, and research providing data to build the plan is critically important.
These studies aim to find evidence supporting the belief in extraterrestrial life, as well as providing hints on how the spacecraft could detect signs of life upon approach.
The new work is a prime example, where scientists have developed a new computer model that can be used to detect oceans beneath the ice using only the spacecraft’s camera.
Their computer model operates by analyzing tiny oscillations – or vibrations – in the moons as they orbit their parent planet.
From this, they can calculate the amounts of water, ice, and rock inside. Less wobbling indicates that the moon is primarily solid, while more wobbling suggests that the icy surface is floating above a liquid water ocean.
When combined with gravity data, the model will calculate the depth of the ocean as well as the thickness of the ice layer above.
To determine whether similar techniques would be effective for Uranus, the authors performed theoretical calculations for its five moons to generate a range of plausible scenarios.
Among these, the three moons Miranda, Ariel, and Umbriel are considered the most likely to harbor subsurface oceans, based on the available data.
The experiments also indicated that to improve the results, the new spacecraft would need to come much closer than Voyager 2 and possibly be equipped with more powerful cameras.
The next step is to expand the model to include measurements from those hypothetical modern instruments and see how the results improve.
Dr. Doug Hemingway, a planetary scientist at the Institute of Geophysics at the University of Texas, stated: “Discovering liquid water oceans within Uranus’s moons would change our thinking about the potential for life.”
Previously, scientists often searched for life on or around planets within the “Goldilocks zone” of star systems, such as Earth, Venus, and Mars.
However, if Uranus or its moons have the potential for life, then similar planets in other star systems might too.
