Jupiter could now be facing some of its own global warming issues. It turns out that Jupiter’s moons could be warming each other, in what is known as a process called tidal heating. This where Jupiter and its moons interact with each other during gravitational tugs which sees the planet and the moon exert pressure in either direction. Till now, it was believed that the planet itself was responsible for the tidal heating process, but the newest research indicates that moon to moon interactions are responsible for the heating up. The new study published in the Geophysical Research Letters suggest that some of Jupiter’s otherwise icy moons contain interiors warm enough to host oceans, which means liquid water.

“Maintaining subsurface oceans against freezing over geological times requires a fine balance between internal heating and heat loss, and yet we have several pieces of evidence that Europa, Ganymede, Callisto and other moons should be ocean worlds. Io, the moon closest to Jupiter, shows widespread volcanic activity, another consequence of tidal heating, but at a higher intensity likely experienced by other terrestrial planets, like Earth, in their early history,” says Antony Trinh, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Lunar and Planetary Lab and the co-author of the study, as reported by Phys.org.