Produced by: Mohsin Shaikh
Miranda, one of Uranus’s 27 moons, is a tiny, icy world with a bizarre surface unlike anything else in the solar system. Could it be hiding a liquid ocean beneath its crust?
In 1986, NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft sent back our first close-up images of Miranda, revealing a patchwork landscape of deep canyons, towering cliffs, and strange trapezoid-shaped regions.
A new study led by Caleb Strom and Tom Nordheim suggests that Miranda might have a vast subsurface ocean, at least 62 miles deep, beneath an icy crust only 19 miles thick.
Miranda’s surface looks like it was pieced together from different worlds. Scientists now think its strange features could be the result of internal heating caused by gravitational forces.
Credit: NASA
Despite being hundreds of millions of miles from the Sun, Miranda may stay warm inside due to tidal heating—gravitational interactions with Uranus and nearby moons generating internal friction.
Tom Nordheim of Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory explains: “Finding evidence of an ocean in such a small object is incredibly surprising and challenges our understanding of icy moons.”
Miranda isn’t the first moon to shock us. In 2004, Saturn’s moon Enceladus was found spewing water vapor into space, hinting at a hidden ocean. Could Miranda be another candidate for extraterrestrial life?
Nordheim emphasizes that we’re working with decades-old Voyager 2 data: “We’ve squeezed all we can from these images. To confirm an ocean, we need new missions to Uranus and its moons.”
If Miranda truly harbors a subsurface ocean, it raises exciting questions about the potential for life in one of the most unexpected corners of our solar system. Is it time to revisit Uranus and unlock Miranda’s secrets?