HomeAstronomyTitan's icy crust creates tides in the moon's subsurface ocean

Titan’s icy crust creates tides in the moon’s subsurface ocean

Saturn’s moon Titan is an odd world. Studied in close detail by NASA’s Cassini mission and other spacecraft, Titan is so cold that seas and lakes of liquid methane and ethane form on its surface. But underneath its rock-hard water ice crust, the moon also harbors an ocean of liquid water that could potentially host life. 

It is this subsurface ocean, or rather its interaction with the ice shell that covers it, that a team of researchers led by the Catholic University of Louvain (UCLouvain) in Belgium hope to better understand. More specifically, they wish to understand how the ocean’s depth and the pressure exerted by the icy shell on the underground water body influence the formation of tidal motions and currents inside of it. 

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