Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, is the only confirmed extraterrestrial ocean with hydrocarbon lakes. There may be subsurface saltwater oceans on Jupiter’s moons, and some scientists believe there may be life in these oceans. Europa is thought to have a liquid ocean beneath its icy crust, which scientists want to explore.
Everyone knows that the Earth has huge oceans. But are there oceans on other planets? As far as we currently know, there are none, except for hydrocarbon oceans on a planetary moon, Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. Scientists also suspect that there may be subsurface saltwater oceans on some of Jupiter’s largest moons, such as Europa, Callisto and Ganymede, but have not yet confirmed this. Some scientists even optimistically believe that there may be life in these oceans below the surface, but this seems extremely unlikely.
The most impressive and the only confirmed extraterrestrial oceans are found on the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan. Titan is a massive moon, about 50% larger and 80% times more massive than our Moon. It is the second largest moon in the Solar System, after Jupiter’s moon Ganymede. Often described as a “planet-like moon,” Titan has a thick nitrogen atmosphere that appears as a deep orange haze. This thick atmosphere blocked our view of the moon for hundreds of years, and it wasn’t until 2007 that the Cassini-Huygens space probe mission visited the moon and launched a probe through its atmosphere and onto its surface.
Scientists had long suspected the existence of hydrocarbon lakes on Titan, but it wasn’t confirmed until Cassini-Huygens made a flyby and imaged the surface with its cloud-penetrating radar. On July 22, 2006, a flyby of radar images confirmed the existence of smooth, dark patches near the moon’s north pole, which were the oceans scientists were looking for. The largest body of hydrocarbons was named Ontario Lacus, after Lake Ontario on Earth. The hydrocarbons were mainly methane and ethane. The lakes discovered ranged from about one kilometer to 100 kilometers in size. They are the only large stable bodies of liquid known to exist anywhere except on Earth. The hydrocarbons found on Titan far exceed the amount of hydrocarbons anywhere on Earth.
Aside from Titan, there are likely liquid oceans deep beneath the crust of icy moons like Europa. These moons are made up of spheres of rock surrounded by a thick layer of ice. As depth increases, the temperature of the ice is thought to increase (due to tidal heating) until it melts and becomes liquid. On Europa, this ocean is thought to be about 100 km (60 mi) deep, and its existence has been suggested by the presence of an induced magnetic field, possible only if it has a surface conducting layer. Many planetary scientists are interested in exploring this ocean by launching a probe at Europa which melts through the outer layer until it penetrates through the surface ice sheet.
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