Like its neighbours Titan and Enceladus, Saturn's moon Dione may harbour an ocean beneath its icy surface.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Mikael Beuthe and his colleagues at the Royal Observatory of Belgium in Brussels studied data collected from Enceladus and Dione by NASA's Cassini spacecraft. They looked for small changes in the moons' gravity and shape that can reveal layers of buried liquid. Data modelling suggested that Dione has a 65-kilometre-deep global ocean hidden beneath some 100 kilometres of ice.

Those waters are a possible habitat for extraterrestrial microbes, should they exist.

Geophys. Res. Lett. http://doi.org/brg7 (2016)