Sentences with phrase «liquid ocean beneath»

KAMUELA, Hawaii — With data collected from the mighty W. M. Keck Observatory, California Institute of Technology (Caltech) astronomer Mike Brown — known as the Pluto killer for discovering a Kuiper - belt object that led to the demotion of Pluto from planetary status — and Kevin Hand from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have found the strongest evidence yet that salty water from the vast liquid ocean beneath Europa's frozen exterior actually makes its way to the surface.

By the time the Voyager probes had flown through the Jovian system in 1979, scientists were fairly sure that Europa had an icy crust, and possibly a liquid ocean beneath.

Scientists thought that could be a sign of a liquid ocean beneath its frozen shell, but couldn't be sure.

That includes Europa, which is thought to harbour a liquid ocean beneath its icy crust.

Ever since NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto last year, evidence has been mounting that the dwarf planet may have a liquid ocean beneath its icy shell.

That's why moons such as Jupiter's Europa and Saturn's Enceladus, among others, may be able to maintain liquid oceans beneath their...

Ice worlds beyond the orbit of Neptune known as Trans - Neptunian Objects may have liquid oceans beneath their icy surface, a NASA study suggested.

Not exact matches

More amazingly, we now know that beneath the crust of Enceladus is a global ocean of liquid saltwater and organic molecules, all being heated by hydrothermal vents on the seafloor.

Beneath its frosty exterior, Titan also hides a deep, liquid - water ocean.

Although its surface is an airless landscape of cracked ice, all the evidence says that beneath that bleak shell is a liquid water ocean stretching hundreds of kilometres down to the rocky mantle below.

Certain tidally stressed moons in the outer solar system, such as Europa and Saturn's moon Enceladus, harbor oceans of liquid water beneath their icy crusts.

In the 1990s the Galileo space probe collected convincing evidence that Jupiter's large moon Europa has a global ocean of liquid water beneath its frozen surface.

Enceladus, Europa, Ganymede, Titan, Triton, Pluto, Eris... they may all have, or have had, large oceans of liquid water trapped beneath a frozen crust.

Titan is the only Solar System moon thought to have liquid at its surface, although Lebreton says oceans may lie beneath crusts of ice on Jupiter's moons Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, and even on Saturn's small moon Enceladus.

Schimdt has found evidence that warm ocean currents and convective forces beneath Europa's frozen shell can cause large blocks of ice to overturn and melt, bringing vast pockets of water, sometimes holding as much liquid as all of the Great Lakes combined, to within several kilometers of the moon's icy surface.

And so it was, when I reported on January 21 that fish were found living in an isolated corner of the ocean beneath 740 meters of ice in Antarctica: People asked what this might mean for finding life on distant worlds such as Europa, a moon of Jupiter that very likely harbors an ocean of liquid water beneath a crust of ice.

Beneath an ice layer about 10 to 15 miles (15 - 25 kilometers) thick, the moon is thought to harbor a liquid water ocean, possibly warmed by geologic processes originating in the planet's core.

If so, she suspects that the liquid could eventually weaken the crust beneath the Atlantic Ocean near the continent's edge, causing it to break off from North America and sink back into the mantle.

And best of all, beneath the ice shell resides an ocean of liquid water some 50 miles deep.

Martian colonies could pack up the spaceship and relocate to Jupiter's moon Europa, where scientists believe a large ocean of liquid water hides beneath an icy crust.

The discovery of a vast lake of liquid carbon dioxide beneath the ocean floor off Taiwan has startled earth scientists and raised hopes for a new strategy against carbon dioxide — related global warming.

The prime target of NASA's orbiter is Jupiter's moon Europa, which is thought to have an ocean of liquid water beneath its icy shell.

A microbe found on Earth has been shown to survive happily in conditions known to exist on Enceladus, which has a liquid water ocean beneath its icy crust.

Enceladus hosts an ocean of liquid water beneath its icy surface.

Mission scientists have determined that this stuff is coming from a huge ocean of liquid water beneath the satellite's shell — and that this ocean may be capable of supporting life as we know it.

Scientists announced Thursday that measurements from NASA's Cassini spacecraft detected hydrogen gas, a key energy source for microbial life, in a plume gushing from a vast liquid water ocean buried beneath the icy shell of Saturn's moon Enceladus.

Enceladus may be covered in an icy shell, but beneath the surface lies a globe - spanning liquid ocean about 37 miles (60 km) deep.

Europa has long been a high priority for exploration because it holds a salty liquid water ocean beneath its icy crust.

If the craft were to crash on the surface of a cold moon like Enceladus, the RTGs could easily thaw a path through tens of kilometers of ice, and plop down into the liquid water ocean beneath, though this might take a long time.

Many scientists believe Europa could be a good place to look for extraterrestrial life because it has an ocean of liquid water beneath its icy surface.

Heat generated by the gravitational pull of moons formed from massive collisions could extend the lifetimes of liquid water oceans beneath the surface of large icy worlds in our outer solar system, according to new NASA research.

«We found that tidal heating can be a tipping point that may have preserved oceans of liquid water beneath the surface of large TNOs like Pluto and Eris to the present day,» said Wade Henning of NASA Goddard and the University of Maryland, College Park, a co-author of the study.

Heat generated by the gravitational pull of moons formed from massive collisions could extend the lifetimes of liquid water oceans beneath the surface of large icy worlds in our outer solar system.

This is the same process of liquid water in the ocean, which when heated expands and becomes lighter and so rises and colder volumes of water around it will sink beneath — in the ocean this is called currents, movements of volumes of water through differential heating.