Do orbital changes to Saturn's moon Mimas suggest the presence of subsurface ocean?
And how can such a tiny, frozen moon have liquid at all?
This article from Sputnik and also the paper published in Nature are interesting but contain some errors and assumptions that I think raise more interesting questions.
Saturn's Smallest Moon Mimas Hides a Subterranean Ocean
Analyzing data from the Cassini spacecraft, which circled Saturn between 2004 and 2017, researchers noted minor variations in the orbit of Mimas. Their findings were published in the journal Nature.
The patterns of its movement and rotation around Saturn indicate the presence of a nascent ocean within Mimas, one that is currently in a state of development.
It should be noted here that these findings are purely from computer modelling of historical data, number crunching based on the gravity and inertia physics of the Standard Model.
Also I will add that Mimas is not the smallest moon of Saturn, but it is a small moon and it is the inner-most moon. Saturn in fact has 146 known moons, but most of them are very small like asteroids or comet nucleai and perhaps that’s exactly what they are.
While I am not disputing the orbital anomalies, I do question whether they are indicative of a subsurface ocean. Because if you step away from the equations and use your eyes it doesn’t look very icy at all.
“If you look at the surface of Mimas, there’s nothing that betrays a subsurface ocean. It’s the most unlikely candidate by far,” said Valery Lainey, an astronomer at the Observatoire de Paris in France.
Valery Lainey makes a good point here. If we compare the image of Mimas above with it’s next-door neighbour moon Enceladus, you will imediately see an entirely different topography.
Enceladus looks to be a much stronger candidate for a subsurface ocean, and there are many images of plumes or jets of matter blasted from fissures in the surface ice.
But it is also strange that these two moons differ so much from one another. Mimas is approximately 400 kilometres in diameter, Enceladus is a little larger at about 500 kilometres, they should be comprised of similar material, yet Mimas is far more heavily cratered and rugged, where Enceladus is much more smooth and reflective with vast systems of channels or cracks and few craters.
Both of these moons have a similar mean surface temperature, about 64 Kelvin (Mimas) and 75 Kelvin (Enceladus), that’s colder than -200 degrees Celsius. It begs the question, where does the energy come from to heat these moons enough to melt the ice? The Standard Model answer to this is that tidal forces flex the surface of these moons in their orbit around Saturn and this results in heat generation through friction.
I have difficulty accepting that tidal friction alone could cause anywhere near a 200 degree increase in temperature. That is a vast amount of energy for a body as large as a moon. Where is the equivalent frictional heat in Earth’s Moon, or even in the Earth from the Sun’s tidal forces? It reminds me of the theory that a runaway greenhouse effect on Venus explains it’s surface temperature of 477 degrees Celsius! Mimas and Enceladus are also far too small to have nuclear reactions warming their cores like Earth is believed to have. So where does this energy come from?
Electric Universe theory tells us that Birkeland Currents connect each of the Planets to our Sun so that energy and ions flow directly between them, warming the atmospheres, making the aurora glow brilliantly and driving our weather systems. The Earth receives warmth (energy) from sunlight but also via electric current from the Sun.
(This is a really good deep-dive into Birkeland Currents for those curious)
Understanding Birkeland Currents and Z-pinches
Each moon also has a Birkeland Current that connects to it’s parent planet, so that a proportion of the current from the Sun to a planet is distributed to it’s moons. In the case of Jupiter and it’s inner-most moon Io, this current is even observable as is the flow of ionized sulphur between the two bodies.
While we are on the topic of heat anomalies in moons, let us have another look at Mimas’ strange topography.
The Death Star Anomaly
Mimas is famous for it’s “Death Star Crater”, a truly enormous crater that must be almost a third of the moon’s diameter. In the Standard Model version of events this could only have formed via collision with another body in space, but how could a moon with a diameter of 400km even possibly remain in one piece after such a vast impact? Even worse, how could a moon comprised mostly of ice (or even liquid water) not have been vaporized entirely by the explosion, rather than leaving a nice sharp crater without any gigantic cracks or signs that a shattered moon later coalesced into a whole body? I think such a crater is quite impossible as a result of a collision in space, fortunately Electric Universe theory has a better explanation for it.
Take another look at the huge crater in the first image of Mimas. Do you notice anything unusual about this crater other than it’s size? It’s shape perhaps?
You can create your own impact craters by dropping big stones onto sand and you will either get a circular crater if the stone drops vertically, or a tear-drop shaped crater if the stone hits the sand at an angle. But if you drop a stone on the sand at any angle at all, you will never end up with a hexagonal crater. The hexagonal shape of this crater is no freak occurrence either, they are found on the Moon, Mars, Mercury, and most other crater-baring bodies.
The answer is that these are not craters formed by an impact. These are craters formed by a huge electrical discharge. When lightning strikes the ground on Earth it creates what is called a fulgurite. Matter is hurled upwards and outwards along the field lines and other surrounding matter is pulled inwards with tremendous magnetic force fusing a permanent record of the lightning strike. On the surface this often creates a crater with a hexagonal shape with a raised dome in the centre, under the ground it creates dendritic structures very much like the fossilized roots of of tree.
These effects scale up as far as you like, a huge lightning discharge will carve out a huge crater and even hurl matter out into space. Sometimes these electrical discharges are not stationary but will move over the surface like an electric tornado carving strange tubelike channels or chains of identical little craters - our Moon is covered with these.
So to conclude, the reason Mimas has a giant hexagonal crater that didn’t destroy the moon entirely is that it was caused by a huge electrical discharge between Saturn and Mimas and some property of electro-magnetism and plasma favours a hexagonal arrangement when matter is moved magnetically and fused, rather like the Giant’s Causeway or most specular of all, the Pole of Saturn itself.
