Beneath the frozen shells of moons circling the outer planets, liquid oceans have long beckoned as possible cradles of life — yet those same moons bear the scars of ancient, catastrophic collisions. A team led by Marc Neveu at the University of Maryland has now shown that even the most violent cosmic impacts do not determine whether these hidden oceans exist; the oceans that were there before a collision tend to survive it, and those that were absent remain absent. Published in Nature Astronomy in August 2026, the finding reframes how scientists think about the durability of life-sustaining co