Researchers Discover Underground Ocean On Jupiter's Moon

Researchers, with the help of Hubble Space Telescope, have discovered a subsurface ocean on Ganymede-largest moon of Jupiter. According to researchers the ocean is supposed to carry more water than all water on Earth's surface.

According to estimates, the discovered ocean on Jupiter's moon is 60 miles thick and 10 times deeper than earth's oceans. The ocean is buried under a 95 mile thick crust of ice.

"The solar system is now looking like a pretty soggy place," said Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA, in the press release. "The more we look at individual moons, the more we see that water is really in enormous abundance."

Ganymede is the largest moon in our solar system. It's also the only moon with its own magnetic field.

"It's like a lighthouse," said Joachim Saur of the University of Cologne in Germany, who led the research. "I was always brainstorming how we could use a telescope in other ways. Is there a way you could use a telescope to look inside a planetary body? Then I thought, the aurorae! Because aurorae are controlled by the magnetic field, if you observe the aurorae in an appropriate way, you learn something about the magnetic field. If you know the magnetic field, then you know something about the moon's interior."

"We ran more than 100 models on supercomputers with different parameters, but every time we got the same result - with no ocean present the aurorae rock by six degrees, if you add an ocean it reduces the rock to two degrees," Saur said at a news conference Thursday announcing the findings.

"Imagine a magnetically active star with a planet close by, by monitoring the auroral activity on that exoplanet we can infer the presence of water." said Heidi Hammel, executive vice president of Assn. of Universities for Research in Astronomy.