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Flat spots on Saturn's moon Titan may be the floors of ancient lake beds
Peculiar flat regions on Saturn's moon Titan could be the dry floors of ancient lakes and seas. The suggestion, published June 16 in Nature Communications, may solve a 20-year-old mystery [open, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-16663-1] [DX].
[...] "Titan is still currently the only other place in the universe that we know to have liquid on its surface, just like the Earth," says planetary scientist Jason Hofgartner of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. But the lakes and seas are concentrated near Titan's poles, not the tropics. The regions where the specular reflections show up are bafflingly dry.
[...] The researchers considered whether rainfall, dunes or dry lake beds could be responsible for the reflections, and found that only lake beds explain the timing and locations of the signals. It does rain on Titan, but not frequently enough to explain the reflections, and Titan's dune fields are in the wrong spots. And the specular reflections come from two specific regions that look like other empty lake basins near Titan's poles (SN: 4/15/19).
[...] So if the reflections come from lost lakes, where did the liquid go? One possibility is that it moved from the equator to the poles as part of a Titan-wide methane cycle (SN: 12/8/17). Another is that the liquid evaporated and was destroyed by sunlight striking Titan's atmosphere.
Related: Titan's Flooded Canyons
Tiny Waves Estimated in Titan's Hydrocarbon Lakes
Extreme Methane Rainstorms Appear to Have a Key Role in Shaping Titan's Icy Surface
Acetylene and Butane Could Form Crystals on Titan
(Score: 4, Interesting) by DannyB on Wednesday June 17 2020, @02:27PM (1 child)
In a 95% Nitrogen, 5% Methane atmosphere, [nasa.gov] wouldn't Oxygen be the "dangerous explosive gas" that the natives treat very carefully? Sort of like how we treat propane, methane, butane, and other anes?
Oxygen would be a welding gas. To make it burn hotter, the flame could be surrounded in a bubble of a 2nd gas -- methane, which naturally occurs in Titan's atmosphere.
It leaves me wondering if cows on Titan would fart a flammable gas such as Oxygen. In the event of a space suit failure someone could be desperately gasping to get just one breath of a Titan cow fart.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2020, @03:19PM
What's fascinating about Titan is that its atmosphere isn't toxic. It's suffocating because it contains virtually no oxygen, but it isn't poisonous, at least not for short exposures. You could accidentally breathe in several lungfulls of Titan's atmosphere and you wouldn't have to worry about it. In fact, scientists already did exactly that. They reconstructed Titan's atmosphere by mixing the different gases in the correct proportions. They say it smells like the air around an oil refinery.
And because of the atmospheric pressure (around 1.5 atmospheres), you wouldn't even need a pressure suit, or pressurized habitats to live and work there. All you would need is heated protective suit and an oxygen mask.