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Building from revelations of oceans underneath the surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus by the late Cassini spacecraft, a new study suggests that tidal friction could generate enough heat to power tens of millions to billions of years of hydrothermal activity inside Enceladus if the moon has a highly porous core. The likelihood would increase the moon’s potential as a habitable world.

The paper, “Powering prolonged hydrothermal activity inside Enceladus” is published in Nature Astronomy and authored by Gaël Choblet, Gabriel Tobie, Christophe Sotin, Marie Běhounková, Ondřej Čadek, Frank Postberg, and Ondřej Souček. Choblet and Tobie are also members of the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) team based at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and Sotin is a Co-I for the NAI team at JPL.

A press release is available through the European Space Agency.