Marc Neveu

When ice is warmer and squishier, it becomes more responsive to tidal forces that deform it, mimas lacked the minimum amount of heat to start with to get tidal forces to trigger runaway heating.

This is the first explanation consistent with data returned from NASAs Cassini spacecraft for how a tiny moon such as Enceladus, which is only about as big as Washington state or the British Isles, has a subsurface ocean when other sibling moons that are bigger or closer to Saturn, and therefore more likely to have such oceans, do not.

One billion years is enough for life to emerge 1 billion years after Earth was born, there was life.

We didnt compute the high tides and low tides that each of the five moons experienced at the same time every few hours for 4.5 billion years to do that right, it would take about 20 years on a desktop computer.