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Titan, the largest of Saturn's more than 60 moons, has surprisingly intense rainstorms, according to research by a team of UCLA planetary scientists and geologists. Although the storms are relatively rare—they occur less than once per Titan year, which is 29 and a half Earth years—they occur much more frequently than the scientists expected.
"I would have thought these would be once-a-millennium events, if even that," said Jonathan Mitchell, UCLA associate professor of planetary science and a senior author of the research, which was published Oct. 9 in the journal Nature Geoscience. "So this is quite a surprise."
The storms create massive floods in terrain that are otherwise deserts. Titan's surface is strikingly similar to Earth's, with flowing rivers that spill into great lakes and seas, and the moon has storm clouds that bring seasonal, monsoon-like downpours, Mitchell said. But Titan's precipitation is liquid methane, not water.
"The most intense methane storms in our climate model dump at least a foot of rain a day, which comes close to what we saw in Houston from Hurricane Harvey this summer," said Mitchell, the principal investigator of UCLA's Titan climate modeling research group.
[...] On Earth, intense storms can trigger large flows of sediment that spread into low lands and form cone-shaped features called alluvial fans. In the new study, the UCLA scientists found that regional patterns of extreme rainfall on Titan are correlated with recent detections of alluvial fans, suggesting that they were formed by intense rainstorms.
The finding demonstrates the role of extreme precipitation in shaping Titan's surface, said Seulgi Moon, UCLA assistant professor of geomorphology and a co-senior author of the paper. Moon said the principle likely applies to Mars, which has large alluvial fans of its own, and to other planetary bodies. Greater understanding of the relationship between precipitation and the planetary surfaces could lead to new insights about the impact of climate change on Earth and other planets.
Methane hurricanes. Smoking not advised.
S. P. Faulk et al. Regional patterns of extreme precipitation on Titan consistent with observed alluvial fan distribution, Nature Geoscience (2017). DOI: 10.1038/ngeo3043
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Monday October 16 2017, @01:19AM
Ok, I'll admit that the surface of Titan basically looks the same as the surface of Mars and that was a remark that was made at the time (except for the cool methane lakes/shorelines which we have not photographed closely).
Here's some Space Engine stuff:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9F0fSjG7SVo [youtube.com]
It is free but closed source, but people have made mods for it. It has a flight sim mode, that video is just the default fly through mode. It isn't limited to the 5,000 or so known exoplanets, it can also procedurally generate stars (IRL, only a few hypergiant extragalactic stars are characterized) and exoplanets and you can give a location to someone else and they will see the same thing. So the application can let you look at like, quintillions of planets. Just without any gameplay modes like No Man's Sky.
The Google Earth application added Mars/Moon/etc. imagery years ago. There's also support for VR [techcrunch.com].
I have never wanted to be an early adopter for stuff like VR, so I'm not very concerned about the content drought other than to worry that it might cause VR momentum to spontaneously abort. The content is coming; there is stuff like VR180 [soylentnews.org] and 360-degree cameras. I think tethered VR is a load of crap, so the solution is to either pack CPU/GPU hardware inside the headset, or use something like WiGig for high speed communication between a headset and desktop computer. At the same time you want 6 degrees of movement in your untethered headset which is apparently not feasible for $200 models. The low field of view of current headsets is also crap: don't settle for less than a 200 degree field of view [soylentnews.org].
So I am fine with a trickle. Wait 5 years and all this shit will be much better. Wait until 2025 and you can grab a 40 TB hard drive to hold your 360-degree content.
It will be interesting to see if we get highly addictive VRMMOs as predicted by science fiction and more recently animays. I'm talking about the whole shebang with medium-strong AIs in there for greater immersion. Machine learning and AI research in general could lead to some interesting trends in gaming where NPCs become more interesting and more of a challenge. If it succeeds, some people will be stuck right up in that basement sucking the inevitable UBI tit.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]