11/11 These moons are the only direct window into the interiors of ancient icy worlds. Normally that material stays buried forever. Paper: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

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10/11 Authors’ cautions: the alternative scenario (tidal shredding of a large Kuiper Belt object) cannot be ruled out. The missing ice remains a mystery. More models and laboratory spectra are needed. Impact temperature limits constrain the history, but depend on many factors.

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9/11 There’s also a hydrated mineral present on all of them… and we still don’t know what it is. It matches nothing in laboratory spectral libraries. Another open piece of the puzzle.

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8/11 Proteus, the largest, has the same mysterious material but almost no trace of the clays. It may have formed from a different region of the debris disk, or undergone later heating.

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7/11 Almost everything is gone. Neptune’s entire present-day inner system has only about 1% of the mass of Uranus’s five large satellites (used by the authors as a comparison because they represent a “normal” system). Just debris remains of what once existed.

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