I love the moon. Everyone knows that, but love it a little bit more now.

We actually made a really cool discovery. So if we're looking for extraterrestrial life,

what better place to start than the giant ocean? And it's dubbed a hot ice world.

Hello, welcome to the supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society.

With me, science journalist Izzy Clark and astrophysicist Dr. Becky Smithurst.

And thank you to the UK Space Agency for sponsoring this episode.

All right, time to wrap up warm Izzy because this month we're exploring the icy worlds in our solar system. And to help us, we'll be

joined by Caroline Harper, head of space science at the UK Space Agency. We'll be chatting to

hear about the new mission heading to explore Jupiter's icy wounds. And we'll hear from Professor

Michelle Dockety from Imperial College London, who sent Cassini to investigate Saturn's Moon Enceladus.

And last, but by no means least, Dr Robert Massey, the deputy director of the Royal Astronomical Society, is here too.

So, Robert, what do we classify as an icy world?

Are we talking about worlds that permanently look like a winter here on Earth?

Well, I don't think you have to necessarily think about it as just being like a cold

earth, although that would obviously be a classic example of an icy world.

And there is this idea that 600 million years and more ago, the Earth was like that.

It was there was this snowball Earth idea when there were glaciers all over the planet. And I think if you were an astronomer looking at it from a distant star, you would definitely see it as an icy world. But in our own solar system, we can be talking about things like the moons, some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, like Europa with a dirty, great, thick 20 kilometre ice crust above an ocean, and celerus around Saturn, which shoots geys of water into space, but again, it's got this big, thick ice crust. And we also talk about Uranus and Neptune as ice giants, too. So you don't, although it is a category, you can think about this sort of, you know, somehow narnia in the depths of winter. You could also think about just cold planets to places that are so far from the sun,

that at least the top of their atmosphere is really very cold indeed.

I mean, that's a book I want to read, Narnia in space. Yes, please.

Well, we need to pitch this, don't we?

I don't add it to our list of sci-fi, yeah.

Cheers, Robert.

...