Titanic Tides of Jupiter's Moon Europa

A hidden ocean, sealed under kilometers of ice, far off in space. That image is so utterly calm you might have fallen asleep while reading it (in which case we apologize for stealing hours of your life), and according to Robert Tyler of the University of Washington it's entirely wrong. He's made mathematical models showing that the secret seas are hugely violent bodies thrown around by the immense mass of Jupiter.

Europa has been of interest since we started to suspect it hid water under its frozen crust, attracting the interest of everyone from NASA to Arthur C. Clarke. The widely accepted picture has Europa's rocky core stressed by the Jupiter's gravity. Which is a lot, by the way - at two times ten to the power of twenty-seven kilograms, Jupiter is so massive the SI system doesn't even have a prefix that goes that high. Two thousand "yottagrams" is as close as you can get, and I think we can all agree the word "yottagram" doesn't quite get across how big that is. As in "the planet you're standing on is only six yottagrams."

Affiliate Assistant Professor Tyler's model, however, has those massive gravitational forces acting on the oceans directly. The result is truly titanic tides, waves so gigantic they make the Titanic itself look like a speck of sand. His models put the minimum kinetic energy of the flow at seven point three exaJoules. In the standard unit for ridiculous amounts of energy, that's one hundred thousand times the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima, or 100 kiloLittleBoys.

The theory is meeting with some resistance, as papers effectively titled "Everything all y'all were saying up to now was wrong" usually do. We won't know either way until we get a closer look at this most interesting of interplanetary destinations. Until then we know one thing: with a theory that involves incredible undersea upheaval, super-nuclear natural disasters and energy sources for potential alien life, if it turns out he isn't right about the science Prof Tyler can always work with Michael Bay.

Posted by Luke McKinney.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/12/081210-europa-oceans.html