It's quite a surprise, said Valery Lainey, an astronomer at the Observatoire de Paris in France. If you look at the surface of Mimas, there's nothing that betrays a subsurface ocean. It's the most unlikely candidate by far.
By astronomical standards, Mimas's ocean appears to be relatively young, forming in the past 25 million years when powerful tidal forces exerted by Saturn deformed Mimas's core, warming it like a massaged squash ball. The heated core then melted overlying ice, creating an ocean inside the Saturnian moon.
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