A gas giant planet beyond the solar that wobbles as it circles its star, hinting to astronomers that it is orbited by its own moon. To make this suspected discovery even more remarkable, if this moon exists it would be absolutely massive, comparable to around half the mass of Jupiter. That would make it thousands of times more massive than any moon orbiting a solar system plane  — so massive it could make astronomers reconsider what constitutes a moon.

The extra-solar planet, or “exoplanet,” suspected to host this tremendous exomoon is HD 206893 B, a gas giant with 28 times the mass of Jupiter, which orbits a young star located around 133 light-years from Earth. The team behind this research detected signs of the potential exomoon while investigating HD 206893 B with the GRAVITY instrument at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) located in the Atacama desert region of northern Chile.

“What we found is that HD 206893 B doesn’t just follow a smooth orbit around its star. On top of that motion, it shows a small but measurable back-and-forth ‘wobble’. The wobble has a period of about nine months and a size comparable to the Earth–moon distance,” team leader and University of Cambridge astronomer Quentin Kral told Space.com. “This kind of signal is exactly what you would expect if the object were being tugged by an unseen companion, such as a large moon, making this system a particularly intriguing candidate for hosting an exomoon.”

The GRAVITY instrument allowed the team to use a technique called astrometry, which precisely measures the positions of stars and other astronomical bodies over time. This allows astronomers to detect tiny aberrations in motion that are the result of a gravitational “tug” from an unseen body.

“This technique has previously been used to measure the long, slow orbits of massive exoplanets and brown dwarfs, where observations spaced years apart are sufficient,” Kral said. “In our study, we pushed this approach much further by monitoring the object over much shorter timescales, from days to months. What we found is that HD 206893 B doesn’t just follow a smooth orbit around its star. On top of that motion, it shows a small but measurable back-and-forth ‘wobble.'”

The result of this investigation was the inference of a companion body orbiting HD 206893 B around once every nine months at a distance of around one-fifth the distance between Earth and the sun. The orbit of this potential exomoon is tilted at around 60 degrees relative to the orbital plane of its parent planet, potentially indicating some type of interaction has disturbed this system at some point in its history.

Of course, what would be really extraordinary about this exomoon, if confirmed, is its absolutely tremendous mass, around 40% of Jupiter’s mass, or around nine times the mass of the ice giant Neptune! That is so big it could call into question the definition of the word “moon.”

“In our solar system, the most massive moon is Ganymede, which is still extremely small compared to what we are inferring here. Ganymede is thousands of times less massive than Neptune, so there is an enormous gap in mass between the largest moons we know and this potential exomoon candidate,” Kral said.

“This naturally raises the question of whether such an object should even be called a moon. At these masses, the distinction between a massive moon and a very low-mass companion becomes blurred. However, there is currently no official definition of an exomoon, and in practice, astronomers generally refer to any object orbiting a planet or substellar companion as a moon.”

Though astronomers believe that several exomoons have been detected in the past, all of these possible detections have been controversial. Thus, the team is hoping that the exomoon of HD 206893 B can be the first to be officially confirmed.

“Exomoons are difficult to detect because they produce signals that are extremely small compared to those of planets, and those signals depend very strongly on both the observing technique and the system’s geometry,” Kral explained.

The most successful method of exoplanet detection thus far has been the transit method, which measures the dip in light caused as a planet crosses, or “transits”, the face of its parent star.

However, this technique hasn’t been nearly as successful at detecting exomoons.

“The transit method — which has been the most successful technique for finding exoplanets — can, in principle, detect moons comparable in size to Jupiter’s largest moons. However, it is most sensitive to planets orbiting very close to their stars, and theoretical studies suggest that such close-in planets are unlikely to retain large moons over long periods of time,” Kral said.

“Astrometry, the technique we use, is sensitive to longer-period moons orbiting planets or substellar companions far from their stars. This makes it particularly promising for detecting exomoons in regions where they are expected to be stable — at least for the most massive moons, which are likely to be the first ones we can find.”

In addition to hopefully confirming the presence of this exomoon, Kral and colleagues think this research and the technique they used lay down a future roadmap for exomoon discovery in other planetary systems.

“It’s important to keep in mind that we are likely only seeing the tip of the iceberg,” Kral concluded. “Just as the first exoplanets discovered were the most massive ones orbiting very close to their stars — simply because they were the easiest to detect — the first exomoons we identify are expected to be the most massive and extreme examples.

“As observational techniques improve, our definitions and understanding of what constitutes a moon will almost certainly evolve.”

The team’s research is available as a pre-peer-reviewed paper on the repository site arXiv, and accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics

GRU Space, short for Galactic Resource Utilization, opened applications for a spot at its proposed lunar hotel. Wealthy space tourists can put their hat in the ring for a hefty deposit of $1 million to be the first guests at the company’s hotel on the Moon, with the grand opening planned for as early as 2032.

The commercialization of the Moon seems inevitable at this point, and space startups are wanting to secure their spot on the lunar soil. GRU Space aims to begin testing its technology on the Moon by 2029, deploying inflatable structures and turning lunar regolith into bricks.

Open for reservation

GRU Space is a newcomer on the space industry scene. Twenty-two-year-old Skyler Chan founded the company just last year, and it has since received backing from investors at SpaceX and Anduril.

At the heart of the company is the idea that space tourism is ideal for fueling the lunar economy, targeting former participants who have already taken part in commercial spaceflight, as well as first-time thrill-seekers looking to go beyond Earth for their next adventure.

Moon-based hotels may seem far-fetched or like something out of science fiction, but the company has laid out a plan to make it happen sooner than expected. In 2029, GRU Space aims to send its first mission to the Moon using NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS), which contracts companies to land small payloads on the lunar surface.

The payload includes an inflatable structure designed to demonstrate the material that will eventually be used to build the hotel. GRU Space also plans to test a method for turning lunar regolith into bricks, which would later be used to surround the inflatable structure and protect it from the Moon’s harsh environment.

If all goes well with the first mission, GRU Space hopes to launch a larger payload on a subsequent CLPS mission. This time, the inflatable structure would be set up inside a lunar pit, a collapsed depression on the Moon that may offer warmer temperatures than the surface.

For its third mission, tentatively planned for 2032, the company aims to deploy the first version of its hotel, a much larger inflatable structure manufactured on Earth. This initial version of the Moon hotel would be big enough to support four guests at a time.

Afterwards, GRU Space will continue to scale up its lunar hotel, adding more inflatable structures surrounded by lunar bricks.

Vacation spot

NASA already has plans in place to establish a sustainable human presence on the Moon. The space agency is gearing up to launch its Artemis 2 mission as early as February, followed by Artemis 3 in 2028, which aims to land the first astronaut crew on the Moon since Apollo. Through its new lunar program, NASA seeks to establish the Artemis Base Camp for astronauts to live and work on the Moon.

China has similar plans, aiming to land its first crew of astronauts on the Moon by 2030 and build a lunar base near the south pole around 2035.

As the commercial space industry continues to grow, the privatization of space forces tourism into the equation alongside state-backed ventures. “We live during an inflection point where we can actually become interplanetary before we die,” Chan told Founded. “If we succeed, billions of human lives will be born on the moon and Mars and be able to experience the beauty of lunar and martian life.”

GRU Space will begin reviewing applications for its Moon hotel this year. If selected, participants will be asked to put down a deposit ranging from $250,000 to $1 million. The deposit will go into the final price for a stay at the hotel, which the company estimates will exceed $10 million.

Today’s top story: A blast of sun-stuff fired out by Sunday’s X1.9 (strong) flare impacted Earth last night. It reached our magnetic field at approximately 18:38 UTC, and it didn’t arrive quietly; we observed G4 (severe) geomagnetic storm levels overnight and into this morning. Many at northern latitudes saw the resulting auroras. But this light display was less widespread than you’d expect for such a strong storm. Why? Discover the intriguing science here.

Past 24 hours on the sun

(11 UTC January 19 – 11 UTC January 20)

• Flare activity: Solar activity reached moderate levels, with 14 flares observed over the past day. The total included 1 M-class (moderate) flare and 13 C-class (common) flares.
  • Strongest flare: M1.2 from AR4345 at 11:19 UTC on January 19.
• Sunspot regions: The Earth-facing solar disk currently holds 10 numbered active regions.
  • Past day’s most active region: AR4345 was the key driver of impacts, producing the M1.2 event and additional 8 C-class flares.
  • Regions to watch:
    • AR4341 (beta) lost some magnetic complexity, but remains under a close eye after firing the recent X flare.
    • AR4345 – today’s lead flare producer – and AR4342 both have moderately high-potential beta-gamma complexities.
• Sun-stuff blasts? Other than the coronal mass ejection (CME) that triggered severe geomagnetic storming last night, no new Earth-bound CMEs have been observed.

Past 24 hours in space weather

• Solar wind: Solar wind speeds dramatically increased to very high levels following the arrival of the CME last night, along with continuing coronal hole influence. The interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) was high. The Bz component was mainly oriented northward overnight, limiting aurora potential, although there was a brief southward period from 5-10 UTC today.
• Earth’s magnetic field: Earth’s magnetic field ranged up to extreme geomagnetic storms, reaching Kp = 9. The Kp index is at 8 at the time of this writing.

Sun activity and space weather forecast

• Flare activity forecast: Moderate levels of flaring are expected, with continued chances for M-class flares mainly from AR4341. A slight chance for another X-class flare remains through January 21, again primarily tied to AR4341.
• Geomagnetic activity forecast:
  • January 20: The major CME has arrived, bringing a continued chance for G3 (strong) to G4 (severe) geomagnetic storming.
  • January 21: Activity should gradually ease toward unsettled levels as coronal hole influence continues and any remnants of the CME effects wane. Lingering storm intervals remain possible depending on how long the CME’s magnetic field stays favorably southward.

Sun news January 19: X flare and CME fired our way!

BAM! The sun exploded with a powerful X1.9 flare from sunspot region AR4341 yesterday. The blast triggered an R3 (strong) radio blackout across Earth’s sunlit hemisphere. And it also launched a huge blob of solar material – a coronal mass ejection, or CME – toward our planet. It’s the classic setup for geomagnetic storms and auroras once the plasma cloud reaches Earth.

Meanwhile, energetic protons from the sun are raining down on Earth in the wake of the X flare, causing an ongoing solar radiation storm at S3 (strong) levels. This has triggered what’s called a polar cap absorption event, degrading or completely disrupting high-frequency radio communications inside the Arctic Circle.

Past 24 hours on the sun

(11 UTC January 18 – 11 UTC January 19)

• Flare activity: Solar activity reached high levels, with 9 flares observed (1 X-class [strong], 0 M-class [moderate], 8 C-class [common]).
  • Strongest flare: X1.9 from AR4341 at 17:27 UTC on January 18.
• Sunspot regions: The Earth-facing solar disk currently holds 9 numbered active regions.
  • Past day’s most active region: AR4341 was the key driver of impacts, producing the X1.9 event and additional C-class activity.
  • Region to watch:
    • AR4341 (beta-gamma) maintained a magnetically complex structure with a weak delta region, and produced the X flare.
• Sun-stuff blasts? An Earth-directed, full-halo coronal mass ejection erupted at 18:09 UTC with the X1.9 flare. Analysts estimate Earth arrival around 1-3 UTC on 20 Jan. It’s expected to trigger a Kp of 7–9, which could mean G3-G5 (strong to extreme) geomagnetic storms.

Past 24 hours in space weather

• Solar wind: Solar wind speeds decreased under continuing coronal hole influence. The interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) was moderate. The Bz component trended southward at times, briefly opening the door for enhanced aurora potential.
• Earth’s magnetic field: Earth’s magnetic field ranged from quiet to active levels, reaching Kp = 4.

The sun in recent days

Sun images from our community

We sometimes feature sun images obtained using hydrogen-alpha filters. Read why.

Bottom line: Earth’s geomagnetic field was disturbed to G4 (severe) storm levels overnight following the arrival of the coronal mass ejection from Sunday’s X flare. Did you catch any auroras?

While a great deal of skepticism has always surrounded the accuracy of these predictions, many people remain adamant that she had successfully foretold a wide range of major global events.

Even though she died back in 1996 at the age of 85, her predictions are still referenced and scrutinized for indications of what might come to pass in the future.

One prediction in particular that has become increasingly relevant is that of a “large spaceship” arriving on Earth in November 2026 – thus bringing with it first contact between humans and aliens.

There are also references to this happening during a sporting event.

One alternative interpretation of this prediction suggests that the spacecraft was actually due to arrive this year instead and the discovery of 3I/ATLAS in our solar system back in July certainly got some people believing that it was actually about to happen.

When the comet passed its closest approach to Earth a few days ago and began heading back out into the solar system, however, that possibility seemed to have been put to bed.

Alien visitors aside, Baba Vanga also predicted other things for 2026 such as wars, earthquakes and floods – although none of these things are anything new.

Whether anything will happen next year that can be explicitly connected to one of her predictions, however, remains to be seen.

Known as a time reflection, this peculiar phenomena occurs when the medium in which electromagnetic waves are traveling suddenly changes direction, causing a portion of the waves to reverse.

It’s difficult to explain what this means in practice, but imagine if you looked at yourself in a mirror and instead of seeing your face you saw the back of your head…

Up until recently, scientists believed that it simply wasn’t possible to actually reproduce time reflections experimentally due to the amount of energy required, but now a team of researchers at the CUNY Graduate Center’s Advanced Science Research Center in New York City has managed to achieve the seemingly impossible by sending a broadband signal into a metal strip filled with electronic switches.

By triggering the switches, the scientists were able to double the impedance and thus produce a time reflection.

“It is very difficult to change the properties of a medium quick enough, uniformly, and with enough contrast to time reflect electromagnetic signals because they oscillate very fast,” said study co-author Gengyu Xu.

“Our idea was to avoid changing the properties of the host material, and instead create a metamaterial in which additional elements can be abruptly added or subtracted through fast switches.”

It is hoped that the research will help to build improved wireless communications and computer systems.

“This has been really exciting to see, because of how long ago this counterintuitive phenomenon was predicted, and how different time-reflected waves behave compared to space-reflected ones,” said co-author Andrea Alu.

Next year, Artemis II will see its first astronauts venture around the Moon and back again, while the first manned landing on the Moon since the Apollo era could now happen as early as 2028.

This would, according to the order:

“Assert American leadership in space, lay the foundations for lunar economic development, prepare for the journey to Mars, and inspire the next generation of American explorers.

But the plans go even further than that – demanding that NASA set up the “initial elements of a permanent lunar outpost” by as soon as 2030.

There are also plans to place nuclear reactors both in Earth’s orbit and on the lunar surface.

Trump himself is clearly hoping to see American astronauts walking on the Moon both during his tenure and before China manages to beat them to it.

That said, delays are still likely given that the new lunar lander vehicle – which is being developed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX – is not yet ready and we haven’t really seen anything about it at all.

It seems more likely that, while Artemis II will likely go ahead next year as planned, Artemis III (the actual landing) will be pushed back to 2030 and the outpost plans pushed back to beyond that.

Whatever happens, the US will need to get a move on as the threat from China is very real.

Whether the next person to walk on the Moon will be American or Chinese still remains to be seen.

It has been hailed as a game changer in public attitudes towards UFOs, ending a culture of silence around claims once dismissed as the preserve of conspiracy theorists and crackpots.

The Age of Disclosure has been boosted in its effort to shift the conversation about extraterrestrials from the fringe to the mainstream with a Capitol Hill screening and considerable commercial success. It broke the record for highest-grossing documentary on Amazon’s Prime Video within 48 hours of its release, Deadline reported this week.

But not everyone is impressed by the film’s claims that UFOs – now called UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) – are real and that governments have been hiding evidence for decades. Several sceptics have gone online to push back at The Age of Disclosure, contending that it has been over-hyped and fails to present new or compelling evidence.

In their telling, the documentary has slick production values but rehashes familiar, decades-old grainy infrared videos and anecdotal pilot testimonies insufficient to support extraordinary claims of alien technology.

Michael Shermer, the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, says by phone from Santa Barbara, California: “All we have are blurry photographs, grainy videos and anecdotes from people that say they know somebody who knows something, or they know somebody who said they saw the spaceship, touched the aliens or worked on back engineering the spaceships and so on.

“But if you say, who was this person you talked to? ‘Well, I can’t tell you.’ Where was the spaceship? ‘I can’t tell you.’ Do you have any photographs? ‘No, but here’s this grainy video of this blob that was taken from a navy pilot 14 years ago off the coast of San Diego. This is kind of weird. It’s hard to say what it is but it could be aliens.’

Shermer, who for 30 years taught college and university courses in critical thinking and has written books including Why People Believe Weird Things, adds: “From a scientific point of view, none of this is valuable other than well, there might be something interesting here, let’s go find out. It’s no different from the whole search for Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yeti, that whole thing.”

Directed and produced by Dan Farah, The Age of Disclosure asserts an 80-year global cover-up of non-human intelligent life and secret recovery and reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial technology. It features interviews with 34 individuals from US government, military and intelligence backgrounds.

They include secretary of state and national security adviser Marco Rubio, senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota and former director of national intelligence James Clapper. Their presence has been seen as giving the film heft and helping reduce the stigma long felt by alleged UAP witnesses.

In an interview last week on Fox News, Rubio was asked about his claim in the documentary that unknown entities have been operating in the airspace over restricted nuclear facilities. He did not attack the documentary or seek to disown his remarks – but he did seek to add some context.

“First of all, I’m not disavowing that,” Rubio said. “It was an interview that was done almost, like, maybe three or four years ago when I was in the senate. So it wasn’t recent. The second point I would make, I was describing the allegations that people have come forward with … I was describing what people had said to me, not things that I had firsthand knowledge of in that regard. A little bit of selective editing, but it’s okay because you’re trying to sell a show there.”

Sceptics argue that UAP sightings are better explained by a combination of misidentification of mundane objects (balloons, satellites, drones), perceptual errors in low-information environments, secret terrestrial technologies and misunderstood optical and sensor phenomena.

Jason Colavito, author of The Cult of Alien Gods: HP Lovecraft and Extraterrestrial Pop Culture, comments: “While I can’t possibly give a single explanation for UFOs, or categorically say that no UFO has ever been an alien spaceship, every UFO that has ever been identified has turned out to be a prosaic – either natural or human made – object, and there’s no reason to suspect that any of the objects seen in that movie are anything but that.”

Colavito was left cold by The Age of Disclosure. “I found the film to basically be an Ancient Aliens episode with better lighting,” he says. “It was a rehash of material that has been used many times before. I thought that it was old stuff in a slick new package. A lot of the people that you saw interviewed have already appeared on Ancient Aliens, on NewsNation and on other platforms saying the same thing.

“The only surprising thing was that they actually went into some of the more extreme and ridiculous pseudoscientific claims they make about how we can’t photograph UFOs clearly because they’re in a space time quantum bubble that distorts all the light around them so we can’t see them. That’s obviously an ex post facto explanation. These are things that people who are very smart have fooled themselves into thinking are true in order to justify a belief that they already came into the process holding.”

Colavito notes that the film has had an extensive and expensive publicity campaign including a Hollywood-style premiere. He sees it as part of a sophisticated media campaign aimed at securing government funding for defence contractors and associated thinktanks.

“One of the things that surprised me is how much of the film seemed to be an advertisement for investing in UFO-themed energy research. That’s where you have to look into the question of how many of the talking heads in that documentary have government ties, not just that they formerly worked in the government, but that they are currently profiting from the work that they’re doing promoting UFOs.

“Luis Elizondo [an author and UAP disclosure activist who also serves as an executive producer on the film], for example, works for a defence contracting company, or at least did until recently, and many of the others also have current or former ties to defence contractors and other businesses and entities that make money from government contracts and government investment.”

But for all the headlines and TV attention, Colavito doubts that the buzz will last. “It’s already fading from coverage,” he says. “This was the kind of thing that has a big publicity campaign leading up to it but then, once people begin to see the actual product, interest falls off rapidly because there is nothing new and nothing convincing in the film. There are a lot of stories but very few facts.”

Joshua Semeter, director of Boston University’s Center for Space Physics, has only seen the trailer for The Age of Disclosure and was unimpressed. “I guess the word is disappointed to see that their primary evidence is all of these grainy infrared videos.” he says. “There’s a lot of money to be made by keeping things in the spooky category. That’s basically what’s going on here.”

Semeter, who served on a Nasa team studying the origin of UAPs, believes that the film is unlikely to create a lasting cultural shift or mainstream acceptance of its claims. Instead it is the culmination of a recent period of heightened interest in UAPs.

“We went through a UAP bubble over the past eight years and a lot of this evidence that’s being put forth by the aviators is very old evidence from the 2000s. We’re at the tail end. This production was an effort to grab the last little bits as we head out of the current UAP bubble.”

Although the projectile wasn’t recovered, the windshield glass showed signs of melting and scorching, implying the object that glanced off the car was flying through the atmosphere at meteoric speed, much faster than a bullet. The odds of this impact are estimated to be roughly a billion to one, and if confirmed it would be the first known meteorite collision with a moving vehicle.

The tourist from Texas noted that the unusual form “made a distinct pattern in the water I couldn’t see anywhere else, kind of like its own wake, and then it was gone.” Fortunately, Mielke managed to snap a photo (seen here) of the odd anomaly, which she subsequently submitted to the Official Loch Ness Monster Sightings Register along with her account of the incident. The visual and anecdotal evidence were well-received by the website, which recognized the incident as the fifth official Nessie sighting of 2025. Mielke’s potential glimpse of the famed creature occurred less than two weeks after the fourth official sighting on October 15th, suggesting that the legendary monster just might make a few more appearances before the year comes to a close.

While the new analysis also suggests that more complex life forms may have difficulty surviving in the slushy environment they suspect lies beneath Titan’s icy surface, the researchers suspect that smaller pockets of water could increase the overall chances of finding simpler life forms like those found in Earth’s polar environments.

a Main Target in the Search for Life Beyond Earth

One of 274 moons orbiting Saturn, Titan has long fascinated scientists due to its unique surface features. For example, Titan is the only solar system body besides Earth that may potentially have liquids on its surface, in the form of methane and ethane. The moon also experiences periodic rainfall, making it the only moon known to experience precipitation that reaches its surface.

But unlike Earth’s oceans, Titan’s lakes, rivers, and rains are made of hydrocarbons such as methane and ethane, not liquid water. When combined with its icy surface temperature of –290 degrees Fahrenheit (–179°C), it is considered unlikely that life could exist in any of those liquid environments.

When NASA scientists first analyzed data from Cassini’s decade-plus mission to Saturn and its moons, the initial readings suggested that a large, liquid-water ocean may exist beneath Titan. The discovery fueled speculation about possible extraterrestrial life forms living in such an ocean, including whether more complex life could exist under such conditions.

More recently, evidence has mounted that several other solar system moons, including Saturn’s “Death Star” moon Mimas and Jupiter’s Ganymede and Europa, may also have massive seawater oceans underneath their icy shells. Those discoveries have once again increased optimism that future missions to those space bodies could discover the first irrefutable evidence of life beyond Earth.

New Models Predict ‘Slushy’ Interior Instead of a Liquid Ocean

In the new analysis, the team set out to characterize Titan’s potential subsurface ocean. Specifically, they wanted to understand the degree to which the moon stretches in response to Saturn’s gravitational pull and the duration of that stretching to determine the energy required. The team said this is critical because the moon’s stretching was the first major clue that led researchers to propose the possibility of an ocean back in 2008.

“The deformation we detected during the initial analysis of the Cassini mission data could have been compatible with a global ocean,” explained Baptiste Journaux, a University of Washington assistant professor of Earth and space sciences.

Still, the researcher explained, the moon’s “degree of deformation” depends on Titan’s internal structure.

“A deep ocean would permit the crust to flex more under Saturn’s gravitational pull, but if Titan were entirely frozen, it wouldn’t deform as much,” Journaux said.

Where previous models had supported the possibility of an ocean beneath Titan, the team’s newest models added a component not included in earlier versions: the timing of the deformations. The NASA-led team said that adding this variable was critical, since a closer analysis of the Cassini data showed that Titan’s most considerable deformation occurs roughly 15 hours after Saturn’s peak gravitational pull.

After adding this delay to the updated models, the team found that much more energy was being dissipated in Titan than previously estimated. This increased energy dissipation allowed them to make more informed inferences about the moon’s interior structure. Specifically, the long deformation delay indicated the interior structure was much thicker and viscous than simple water, since more energy was needed to cause a change in Titan’s shape.

“Nobody was expecting very strong energy dissipation inside Titan,” said the study’s leader, Flavio Petricca, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “That was the smoking gun indicating that Titan’s interior is different from what was inferred from previous analyses.”

Journaux said the results suggest Titan’s icy surface has a thick, slushy layer beneath that requires more energy to deform than water does.

“Instead of an open ocean like we have here on Earth, we’re probably looking at something more like Arctic sea ice or aquifers,” the researcher explained.

Improved Odds of Finding Extraterrestrial Life?

When discussing the new analysis, Journaux said that a slushier Titan interior could have “implications for what type of life we might find.” For instance, a thicker or more viscous environment might lead to nutrients gathering in small areas of water rather than being dispersed throughout an entire global ocean. The team said this increased nutrient density could “facilitate the growth of simple organisms.”

The new model also suggested that these theoretical pockets of nutrient-dense water could reach 68 degrees Fahrenheit in highly localized, transient briny areas under specific conditions, influenced by Saturn’s gravity. The researchers said this warmer environment could also increase the chances of extraterrestrial life on Titan.

“The discovery of a slushy layer on Titan also has exciting implications for the search for life beyond our solar system,” Journaux said. “It expands the range of environments we might consider habitable.”

The team said their updated models suggest that future missions to Titan, such as NASA’s Dragonfly Mission, which includes Journaux as part of the team, may not discover “fish wriggling through slushy channels.” Instead, if a future mission does find signs of life on Saturn’s enigmatic moon, it may resemble the simpler life forms found on Earth’s polar ecosystems.