this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2026
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Saturn's moon Titan has liquid lakes on its surface. Those lakes are full of methane, not water.
Saturn's moon Enceladus and Jupiter's moon Europa are both covered in ice, but it is strongly believed that both worlds have subsurface oceans of liquid water. Europa may contain more water than Earth.
Yeah, if there was any doubt that an outer moon could contain liquid water, Enceladus' active geysers firmly ended that speculation.
Europa's ocean may be on the order of 100 km in depth. By comparison, Earth's average about 4 km. That would make Europa have far more water than Earth despite being smaller than our Moon.
It seems as more data come in, it's getting more and more likely that subsurface liquid water is common in the outer solar system, and that many other moons have varying amounts of it. Even Titan may have water someplace below its surface lakes of liquid methane. The inner solar system is more of a desert, and we are lucky to have what we have.
If you want more mind-blowing stuff, check out discoveries being made about exoplanets (planets around other stars). These were only detected in the 90s, but there are thousands we know about now, and there are some absolutely crazy examples among them.
The collision that created the moon might have been with an ice planetoid that also left a lot of the water we have here.
And on the topic, I just watched an episode of The Universe, which was just added to netflix but was from 2011. Big thing I noticed was the CG in the show was pretty shitty. But they also made no mention about the moon creating collision despite that episode being the top 10 catastrophies in the solar system (which was also kinda a lame topic for a series about "the universe", it would be like a series about cool things in the solar system that just focused on cool things on earth). So don't even have to go back to the 70s for the moon creating collision to not be on the public's radar at least.
Ah yes, good old Theia! That was quite the reveal wasn't it? Reminds of when they finally found that the giant object that wiped out the dinosaurs struck somewhere near present day Cancun.