{"id":496030,"date":"2026-02-22T04:04:09","date_gmt":"2026-02-22T04:04:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/496030\/"},"modified":"2026-02-22T04:04:09","modified_gmt":"2026-02-22T04:04:09","slug":"mirandas-unlikely-ocean-has-us-asking-if-theres-life-clinging-on-around-uranus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/496030\/","title":{"rendered":"Miranda\u2019s Unlikely Ocean Has Us Asking If There\u2019s Life Clinging On Around Uranus"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you\u2019re interested in extraterrestrial life, these past few years have given an embarrassment of places to look, even in our own solar system. Mars has been an obvious choice since before the Space Age; in the orbit of Jupiter, Europa\u2019s oceans have been of interest since Voyager\u2019s day; the geysers of Enceladus give Saturn two moons of interest, if you count the possibility of a methane-based chemistry on Titan. Even faraway Neptune\u2019s giant moon Triton probably has an ocean layer deep inside. Now the planet Uranus is getting in on the act, offering its moon Miranda for consideration in a kinda-recent\u00a0study in the Planetary Science Journal.<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Miranda and Uranus, the new hot spot for life-hunters.\u00a0
Photomontage credit NASA.<\/p>\n

Even if you\u2019re into astronomy, it may seem like this is coming out of left field. \u201cMiranda, really? What new data could we possibly have on a moon of Neptune nobody\u2019s visited since the 1980s?\u201d Well, none, really. This study relies on reexamining the data collected during the Voyager 2 encounter and trying to make sense of the chaotic, icy world that the space probe revealed.<\/p>\n

The faults and other features on Miranda indicated it was geologically active at some point; this study tries to recreate the moon\u2019s history through computer modelling to find that Miranda probably had a \u2265100 km thick ocean sometime in the last 100-500 million years, and that while some of it has likely frozen since, tidal heating could very well keep a layer of liquid water within the moon\u2019s interior. Since the moon itself is only 470 km (290 mi) in diameter, a 100km deep ocean layer would actually be a huge proportion of its volume.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The model is a fairly simple one, with the ocean sandwiched between two layers of ice and a rocky core. Image from Caleb Strom et al 2024 Planet. Sci. J. 5 226<\/p>\n

Right now, the over-optimistic thinking is that \u201cwater means life\u201d, since that\u2019s how it seems to work on Earth. It remains to be seen if Miranda, or indeed any of the icy moons, ever evolved so much as a microbe. Aside from the supposed presence of liquid dihydrogen monoxide, there\u2019s nothing to suggest they have. Finding out is going to take a while: even with boots \u2014 er, robots \u2014 on the ground, Mars isn\u2019t giving up that secret easily<\/a>. Still, if we\u2019re able to discover irrefutable evidence for such extraterrestrial life, it will provide an important constraint on one term of The Drake Equation:<\/a> what fraction of worlds develop life. That by itself won\u2019t tell us \u201care we alone,\u201d but it will be interesting.<\/p>\n

Of course, even if all these worlds are barren now, they might not be for long, once our probes start visiting<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Story via Earth.com<\/a><\/p>\n

Header image: Miranda, imaged by Voyager 2. Credit NASA\/JPL-Caltech<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you\u2019re interested in extraterrestrial life, these past few years have given an embarrassment of places to look,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":496031,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[64,63,128,285],"class_list":["post-496030","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496030","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=496030"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496030\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/496031"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=496030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=496030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=496030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}