There could be life here... right in our very own Solar System.
about the tantalizing hypothesis centered on Saturn's smallest and innermost moon, which she jokingly admitted looks "much like the Death Star from Star Wars" because of Herschel, its huge impact crater.If scientists can prove that Mimas has an ocean, it would represent "a new class of small, 'stealth' ocean worlds with surfaces that do not betray the ocean's existence," Rhoden said in the release.
Rhoden worked with planetary researcher Adeene Denton, formerly a Perdue graduate student who now is getting her doctorate at the senior scientist's onetime employer, the University of Arizona — and both admit that there's still a lot left to figure out, especially if they are able to further bolster the Mimas ocean theory.
"If Mimas has an ocean today, the ice shell has been thinning since the formation of Herschel, which could also explain the lack of fractures on Mimas," Denton said in the release. "If Mimas is an emerging ocean world, that places important constraints on the formation, evolution and habitability of all of the mid-sized moons of Saturn."
A random Saturnian moon may seem like a strange place for habitation, but with recent forays in habitable exoplanet research centering on bodies of water as homes for potential life, the discovery of an ocean on that distant celestial body within our Solar System could be massive.
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