(MENAFN) Saturn’s small, heavily cratered moon, Mimas, may surprisingly conceal a young underground ocean, according to recent research.

This discovery has the potential to change how scientists categorize ocean worlds within our solar system.

“When we look at Mimas, we don’t see any of the things that we’re accustomed to seeing in an ocean world,” explained Alyssa Rhoden, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Colorado, USA.

She made these remarks during the Europlanet Science Congress-Division for Planetary Sciences event last month, as reported by Space.com.

Although Mimas has a continuous, densely cratered surface, new thermal and orbital models propose that liquid water might exist beneath a layer of ice ranging from 12 to 19 miles (20 to 30 kilometers) thick.

Initial hints of an internal ocean came from data collected by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, but recent simulations provide stronger evidence supporting this possibility.

Rhoden and her team discovered that variations in Mimas’ orbit likely produce internal heat through gravitational “tides,” which could have melted sections of the icy shell within the last 10 to 15 million years — a very short span in geological terms.

“It would be hard, but may be doable,” Rhoden remarked about the challenge of detecting this hidden ocean with a future orbital mission.

In parallel, Rhoden’s colleague from SwRI, Adeene Denton, studied the moon’s most prominent feature, Herschel Crater, to gain further insight into Mimas’ past.

“Mimas needs to be right on the tipping point,” Denton told Space.com.

Her research, published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, suggests that the crater was created while the subsurface was beginning to melt — at a stage when the ice was soft but had not yet become liquid.

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