A soft heart keeps Enceladus warm from the inside. Friction within its porous core could help Saturn’s icy moon maintain a liquid ocean for billions of years and explain why it sprays plumes from its south pole, astronomers report November 6 in Nature Astronomy.
Observations in 2015 showed that Enceladus’ icy surface is a shell that’s completely detached from its rocky core, meaning the ocean spans the entire globe (SN: 10/17/15, p. 8). Those measurements also showed that the ice is not thick enough to keep the ocean liquid.
Other icy moons, like Jupiter’s Europa, keep subsurface oceans warm through the energy…
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