How do we know that there is a salty ocean underneath Europa’s icy surface?

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Europa is one of Jupiter’s moons and apparently has a “water-ice crust”, “salty ocean of liquid water”, and a “rocky sea floor”. How could we know this much information in great detail from a telescope?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Two related points that may help you work through the question:

1- We don’t know, but we strongly *suspect* the ocean is there. We can’t see the ocean, but we can see plenty of other things! And one of the best explanations for what we see is that there is either an ocean down there or a lot of aquifer-type pools of (probably) salty water that seeps up to the surface from time to time.

2- We’re not limited to telescopes on Earth or in Earth orbit, we’ve sent several probes to/past Jupiter, some only went by on their way to further places, others dropped into orbit. We have some pretty close-up data from onboard camera-telescopes as well as a variety of other sensors that can do spectroscopy, sniff magnetic fields, bounce radar or similar, and so on.

There is a *lot* of work/data that’s been collected around Jupiter, including many of its moons, and there are potential future missions that would focus on the moons specifically, but it’s far more than can fit in a single comment so I’ll drop you the wikipedia page and you can check out the sources (at the bottom!) and the various reference links in the article: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_Jupiter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_Jupiter)

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