Hidden oceans and alien life

The frozen moons of the giant planets could be harbouring alien life beneath their surfaces. Lewis Dartnell looks at how we can discover what lurks beneath the ice

Earth is often considered to be a water world: over 70 per cent of our planet’s surface is covered in oceans. Since our planet orbits within what’s known as the ‘Goldilocks zone’ around the Sun, the warmth it receives is just right for keeping water in its liquid state. But there are several moons in the outer Solar System that are also known to hold significant bodies of liquid water. Subsurface oceans Beyond Earth’s orbit, the Sun doesn’t deliver enough warmth to keep water liquid and so these extraterrestrial oceans, or exo-oceans, are kept liquid by a different source of energy. Many of the moons orbiting the gas giant planets Jupiter and Saturn experience significant amounts of tidal heating. The gravitational pull of the parent planet causes two symmetrical bulges…

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BBC Sky at Night United Kingdom (Digital) - 1 Issue, April 2025

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