Ganymede, Europa and Enceladus are small worlds with oceans under an icy surface, Enceladus is a moon of Saturn that apparently is not unique, since the latest discovery is that another moon of Saturn seems to also have a surface ocean, it is famous for its resemblance to the death star from Star Wars.
Mimas also breaks the record that Enceladus had as the smallest object with liquid water inside, Enceladus is about 500 km in diameter and Mimas is only 396 km in diameter, in fact it is so small that it does not have a spherical shape, in a study published on Wednesday, February 7, by a team led by astronomer Valéry Lainey from the Paris Observatory in France, have used data from the Cassini space probe that orbited Saturn between 2004 to 2017, to discover subtle changes in the orbit of mimas that would be the main clue to know that under the icy crust of this small moon and about 20 or 30 km deep there is an ocean of water about 75 km deep.
Researchers estimate that this ocean is very young cosmologically speaking, it is only 5 to 15 million years old, in comparison the internal ocean of Enceladus, the other moon with water on Saturn, is believed to have formed about a billion years ago while Europa, Jupiter's moon, which also houses an ocean under its icy surface, it is estimated that Europa's ocean is almost 4 billion years old.
Mimas resembles the Death Star due to its enormous crater and called Herschel, this crater was the result of the impact of an asteroid about 5 km in diameter, the blow was so violent that it could almost destroy the moon in the center of the crater. There is a mountain 6 km high, but the curious thing is that the design of the Death Star predates the discovery of the crater. Mimas was known, but that crater had not been captured. We did not have telescopes with sufficient resolution to see it. That crater could be seen 3 years after the film's release in 1977.
Another curiosity about this moon is that in 2010 NASA published a map of temperatures in mimas using images obtained by the Cassini Probe, the warmest regions are located along an edge of mimas and create a shape similar to the video game character Pacman, The image is curious and a little funny but be careful, the image of temperatures could perhaps give us a clue about what that ocean is like under the frozen surface of Mimas, we will be attentive to the investigation of this very special Moon.
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