Discovering Water in the Outer Solar System: Saturn’s Ice Rain and Uranus’ Potential Oceans

2023-05-06 13:55:22

[Voice of Hope, May 6, 2023](comprehensive report by our reporter Xie Bohu) When it comes to Saturn, the first thing many people think of is the outer ring of Saturn, but now astronomers have discovered that the ring of Saturn is turning into ice rain and falling on Saturn. Moreover, it is not only Saturn that has water, but even the satellites of Uranus have been discovered, which may have oceans that are warm enough for life to exist.

According to comprehensive media reports, Dr. James O’Donoghue of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency observed Saturn’s rings mainly composed of water ice through the Webb Space Telescope and the telescopes of the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. The rings of Saturn are currently gradually turning into ice rain and falling into Saturn, becoming a part of Saturn.

The NASA probe Cassini-Huygens collected data on the rings of Saturn in 2019. Experts judged that the rings of Saturn should be composed of fragments of comets, asteroids or satellites 10 million to 100 million years ago.

Dr. Donoghue’s research team is still unclear regarding the dissolution rate of Saturn’s rings, but according to current data, the Saturn rings will completely dissolve in regarding hundreds of millions of years, and become ice rain falling on Saturn.

In addition to the ice caps of Mars at the North Pole and the water ice in Saturn’s rings, NASA experts also discovered Uranus, which has 27 satellites, including Ariel, Umbriel, Titania and Austria. Between the core and the icy shell of the four moons of Oberon, there may be a very large ocean of water, and even the ocean of Titania and Oberon may be warm enough to support the existence of life.

This is what NASA found following reanalyzing data from Voyager 2’s close flybys of Uranus in the 1980s and using computer modeling.

The scientist’s statement also overturned people’s understanding of Uranus in the past. Because Uranus, being the seventh farthest from the sun, does not receive enough sunlight, and its other moons are too small to retain the heat needed to keep the subsurface ocean from freezing, Uranus appears to be a cold planet.

But new research challenges this belief. Scientists have found that Titania and Oberon are still emitting hot liquid, possibly because heat from radioactive decay is retained inside, forming a potential heat source.

“When it comes to small bodies — dwarf planets and moons — planetary scientists have found oceans in several unlikely places,” said lead researcher Julie Castillo-Rogez. evidence, including the dwarf planets Ceres and Pluto, and Saturn’s moon Mimas.”

Julie believes that this phenomenon remains to be studied, because there should be some mechanisms that are not fully understood at work.

Editor in charge: Lin Li

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