Space: Does Enceladus have a sandy core that warms its ocean?

Science News said:

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 generated by gravitational flexing of the ice itself. But if that were Enceladus’ only heat source, its ocean would have frozen within 30 million years, a fraction of the age of the solar system, which formed roughly 4.6 billion years ago.

Planetary scientist Gaël Choblet of the University of Nantes in France and his colleagues tested whether friction in the sand and gravel thought to make up Enceladus’ core could heat things up.

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The simulations also showed that certain hot spots in the core, including at the poles, correspond to regions where the ice shell is thinner.

“That was quite cool,” Choblet says. “It explains the internal structure and the way things are organized and the dynamics interior to Enceladus.”

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