He said that there may be an internal ocean, for example, emitting heat from below the surface and nitrogen ice.
That means the outer shell has to be slipping, and there has to be an internal ocean, the team reports tomorrow in Science.
Scientists have completed one of the most comprehensive studies of how internal ocean waves originating from the Luzon Strait in the South China Sea develop, propagate, and fade away, MIT News announced.
The team speculated that continuing geological activity on Pluto might be attributed to an internal ocean, energy retained during planetary formation, or radioactive heat.
Models of internal heating via radioactive decay suggest that Eris may be capable of sustaining an internal ocean of liquid water at the mantle-core boundary.
Ceres appears to be differentiated into a rocky core and icy mantle, and may harbor a remnant internal ocean of liquid water under the layer of ice.
Even in this case Titan may still have an internal ocean made of the eutectic water ammonia mixture with the temperature of 176 K, which is low enough to be explained by the decay of radioactive elements in the core.
Such assessment includes many uncertain factors including soil properties, internal pressure, ocean metadata and others.
The presence of an internal salty ocean with an energy source and simple organic compounds in contact with the moon's rocky core, may advance the study of astrobiology and the study of potentially habitable environments for microbial extraterrestrial life.
Further improvements could include dissipation in oceans or internal liquid layers, variable internal composition, internal structures, radiogenic heating rates, core light element depression, continental crust formation, and eventually a direct coupling of first-principles numerical simulations.
