The puzzling appearance of an ice cloud seemingly out of thin air has prompted NASA scientists to suggest that a different process than previously thought -- possibly similar to one seen over Earth's poles -- could be forming clouds on Saturn's moon Titan.
Located in Titan's stratosphere, the cloud is made of a compound of carbon and nitrogen known as dicyanoacetylene (C4N2), an ingredient in the chemical cocktail that colors the giant moon's hazy, brownish-orange atmosphere.
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"The appearance of this ice cloud goes against everything we know about the way clouds form on Titan," said Carrie Anderson, a CIRS co-investigator at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the study.
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The first step in the proposed process is the formation of ice particles made from the related chemical cyanoacetylene (HC3N). As these tiny bits of ice move downward through Titan's stratosphere, they get coated by hydrogen cyanide (HCN). At this stage, the ice particle has a core and a shell composed of two different chemicals. Occasionally, a photon of ultraviolet light tunnels into the frozen shell and triggers a series of chemical reactions in the ice. These reactions could begin either in the core or within the shell. Both pathways can yield dicyanoacteylene ice and hydrogen as products.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 23 2016, @03:52AM
Unless you've got a story about how Musky is selling tickets for billionaire tourists to fly to Titan, see this cloud, and tweet about it on Twitter.