text: In the early history of the Solar System, radioactive isotopes having a half-life on the order of a few million years (such as aluminium-26 and iron-60) were sufficiently abundant to produce enough heat to cause internal melting of some moons and even some asteroids, such as Vesta noted above.  After these radioactive isotopes had decayed to insignificant levels, the heat generated by longer-lived radioactive isotopes (such as potassium-40, thorium-232, and uranium-235 and uranium-238) was insufficient to keep these bodies molten unless they had an alternative source of internal heating, such as tidal heating.  Thus, Earth's Moon, which has no alternative source of internal heating is now geologically dead, whereas a moon as small as Enceladus that has sufficient tidal heating (or at least had it recently) and some remaining radioactive heating, is able to maintain an active and directly detectable cryovolcanism.