With its tantalizingly secretive surface covered in a dense golden-orange fog, Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, was long regarded as a mysterious and frigid lunar world. However the Cassini–Huygens The mission changed all that when the Huygens-lander floated to the surface of the hazy moon in 2004 and gazed at the well-hidden face of Titan behind its strange orange mask. Although the Cassini–Huygens The mission ended in 2017, planetary scientists are still analyzing the trove of information it sent back to Earth before mission scientists intentionally destroyed it. In October 2019, a team of scientists led by a chemistry professor and researcher at the University of Hawaii (Manoa) announced that they had been able to provide answers to important questions about Titan’s strange surface. Researchers say they have discovered the origin and chemical composition of Titan’s alien dunes.
Physical chemist Dr. Ralf I. Kaiser and colleagues examined remote sensing data provided by Cassini–Huygens Regarding Titan. Titan is the only body in the Solar System, other than Earth, that has a solid surface, lakes, and a substantial atmosphere with a pressure of about 1.5 atmospheres at surface level. Images and data provided by Cassini–Huygens revealed the existence of vast longitudinal dunes on that hazy orange lunar world. The dunes are located in the equatorial deserts of Titan and reach lofty heights of up to 100 meters, making them similar in size to the Egyptian pyramids of Giza. However, while Earth’s dunes are composed primarily of silicates, imaging studies revealed that Titan’s dunes are composed of a different material. Titan’s dunes were shown to contain dark organic compounds that, until this new study, were of undetermined origin and chemical composition.
The University of Hawaii at Manoa (UH) team, which also included Dr. Matthew Abplanalp, then a graduate student at UH, discovered the existence of acetylene ice in Titan’s dunes. Acetylene is a chemical used on Earth in welding torches. It exists in the equatorial regions of Titan, but at low temperatures to representatives of high-energy galactic cosmic rays. The scientists found a fast cosmic ray-driven chemistry that causes simple molecules like acetylene to undergo a radical change into more complex organic molecules like benzene and naphthalene. Naphthalene is a compound found in Earth’s familiar mothballs and exists on the exotic surface of Titan. These processes also occur in the space between stars. (interstellar medium) in hydrocarbon-rich layers of interstellar nanoparticles.
This new research has been published in the journal Progress of science under the title Low temperature synthesis of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in the surface ices of Titan and in airless bodies.
Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are organic compounds that contain only carbon and hydrogen, and are composed of multiple aromatic rings.
The strange face behind the smoky orange mask of a distant moon
Titan is the largest moon of the ringed gas giant planet Saturn, as well as the second largest moon in our Solar System. Only Jupiter’s Ganymede is bigger than Titan. Here, in the frigid realm of the quartet of majestic, gas-giant outer planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, our Sun shines with a fainter fire than in the inner Solar System, where Earth is located. -along with the other three solid and relatively small planets: Mercury, Venus and Mars.
Titan is a hydrocarbon-ridden world that bears an uncanny resemblance to the way our own planet was, long ago, before life arose and evolved here. (prebiotic). Like Earth, Titan experiences frequent downpours, swirling seas, and eroding organic material. However, on Titan, it’s not liquid water that fills its strange seas, rivers, and lakes with beautiful raindrops. On this strange, smog-filled lunar world, life-sustaining liquid water is being replaced by strange, lazy, large droplets of methane. The surface of Titan receives a “rain of terror”: on Titan, it rains gasoline. On this strange moon, atmospheric molecules made up of methane are perpetually being ripped apart by sunlight, and the resulting atmospheric smog floats to the surface, where it accumulates as organic settlements that rapidly steal methane from the atmosphere. Titan’s surface is well coated with the material of ancient atmospheres that are long gone.
There is no obvious source of Titan’s methane, with the exception of evaporation of methane that originates from hydrocarbon-filled polar lakes. The problem is that Titan’s strange lakes contain only about a third of the methane in Titan’s atmosphere. This methane will soon be depleted on geological time scales.
Titan itself is the sixth gravitationally rounded moon from Saturn, and this large lunar world is often described as “planet-like”. Titan is twice the size of Earth’s comparatively large Moon, as well as being 80% more massive. In fact, Titan is larger than the planet Mercury, our star’s innermost parent planet. However, Titan has only 40% of the mass of Mercury.
Titan was discovered by the Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens on March 25, 1655 and was the first moon of Saturn to be observed. It is the sixth known natural planetary satellite, after Earth’s Moon and the quartet of galilean moons of Jupiter (Io, Europa, Ganymede, Y Callisto). The oven galilean moons they were discovered by the great Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei in 1610. Titan revolves around its ringed parent planet at 20 radii from Saturn. From Titan’s strange hydrocarbon-cut surface, Saturn subtends an arc of 5.09 degrees and would be 11.4 times larger in its dense golden-orange sky than the Moon from Earth.
Titan is made up primarily of ice and rocky material, which is thought to differentiate into a rocky core surrounded by various layers of ice, including a crust made of ice, and a subsurface layer of ammonia-rich liquid water. Before the age of space exploration, Titan’s heavy, opaque atmosphere made it impossible for planetary scientists to study its mysterious surface, until the Cassin-Huygens mission. This joint NASA, European Space Agency, and Italian Space Agency mission to the Saturn system finally revealed the strange side of the moon that had been well hidden behind its smog-filled orange mask since its discovery in 1655. Cassini–Huygens provided valuable new information, including the discovery of liquid hydrocarbon lakes that accumulate in Titan’s polar regions. The geologically young surface is mostly smooth, sporting relatively few impact craters. Smooth surfaces are young, while cratered surfaces are older. This is because young surfaces, such as Titan’s, have been refreshed. However, the mountains, as well as several potential cryolcanoes (ice volcanoes)have been observed on this strange and distant lunar world.
Titan’s atmosphere is composed largely of nitrogen; the smallest components result in the formation of thick hydrocarbon clouds made up of methane and ethane, all of which cook up in a witches cauldron of dense organic smog that blankets this tortured lunar world. Titan’s weather, including wind and rain, sculpts surface features that appear eerily similar to our own planet, such as its dunes, lakes, rivers, and seas (likely brimming with liquid methane and ethane). Titan also has deltas and is subject to seasonal weather patterns that are similar to Earth’s. With its liquids, both surface and subterranean, and abundant nitrogen atmosphere, Titan’s exotic methane cycle is analogous to Earth’s water cycle, but at much cooler temperatures of around -290.5 degrees F.
Mysterious dunes of a misty and wet moon
“Titan’s dunes represent the dominant surface carbon sink in Titan’s organic chemistry. Therefore, unraveling the origin and chemical pathways for forming dune organic material is vital not only to understanding the chemical evolution of Titan, but also to understand how similar the chemistries on Titan and on Earth might have been before life arose on Earth 3.5 billion years ago,” noted Dr. Abplanalp in the October 17, 2019 University of Hawaii press release. Dr. Abplanalp is now a researcher at the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division in the Chinese lake.
“These processes ultimately provide the molecular building blocks not only for Titan’s organic dunes, but also for organic compounds in airless bodies in general, such as in Kuiper belt objects dwarf planet dodo The low temperature synthesis of PAH of acetylene ices represents a fundamental change from currently accepted perceptions that GET LUCK the formation takes place only in the gaseous phase at high temperatures of around 1,000 K, as in combustion processes”, he adds.
Tea kuiper belt it is a distant region of our Solar System located beyond the orbit of the outermost planet Neptune. It is believed to contain not only Tiny planetsbut also countless nuclei of frozen comets, asteroids, and a variety of other small bodies made mostly of ice that exist in the deep freeze of our Solar System.
These new findings have unprecedented implications for future space missions to Titan. NASA currently plans to land a flying robot, called Dragon-flyon the surface of Titan, the favorite target in the search for life on worlds beyond Earth, as well as for molecular precursors to life. Dragon-fly— which is about the same size as a car — is a quadcopter that is equipped with instruments that can identify large organic molecules. It is scheduled to launch aboard a rocket in 2026, reach its target in 2034, and then fly to numerous locations hundreds of miles away. Dragon-fly It will land near Titan’s equator near organic dunes, thus providing an in-situ look at potentially biorelevant organic compounds that exist in a deep-frozen state. In this way, the quadcopter will glide to observe the unknown.
“Overall, this study advances our understanding of complex organic compounds and the fundamental chemical processing of simple molecules in deep space and provides a scientifically sound and proven mechanism for the formation of aromatic structures in extreme environments in low-temperature ices. Since Titan is rich in nitrogen, the incorporation of nitrogen into these PAH it can also lead to carbon-nitrogen moieties (parts of a molecule) prevailing in contemporary biochemistry, such as DNA- and RNA-based nitrogenous bases,” explained Dr. Ralf Kaiser in the Oct. 17 issue of 2019. University of Hawaii press release.
