Titan Moon: Saturn's Hydrocarbon World
Titan Moon: In 2004 data from NASA's Cassini-Huygens spacecraft revealed a great deal more detail about the planet sized moon Titan orbiting around Saturn. Titan is Saturn's second largest moon and has been of interest to astronomers since it was suggested that the haze surrounding it was in fact an atmosphere. Titan: Alien Yet Familiar The NASA mission confirmed this to be the case. The atmosphere was found to be a mixture of Nitrogen gas, and the alkane hydrocarbons methane and ethane. The surface was shown to be water ice. Though the surface temperature of Titan is an extremely low 179 degrees celsius, it's physical geography is similar in some ways to that of Earth. There are liquid lakes, dunes, eroded hills showing the passage of liquid and many other familiar features.
Oceans of OilAlong with the gases that make up the haze in the atmosphere, the liquids on the surface have been shown to be hydrocarbons. These are thought to be located mainly at the polar regions. Again, these are mostly methane and ethane. As on Earth, the surface liquid evaporates, forms clouds in the atmosphere and rains back down to the surface. These liquid hydrocarbons then cause the erosion patterns seen in the rock hard water ice. A mountain range seen in the less explored southern part of Titan is thought to be capped with methane snow.
The dunes identified on Titan are mostly in equatorial regions where there is little if any surface liquid. The grains that make up these dunes are probably water ice from erosion caused by the methane rain, as well as a kind of plastic polymer formed in Titan moon's atmosphere by UV radiation causing reactions between the methane molecules. While the exact chemistry of these methane reactions remains a mystery, the formation of plastic-like substances in the atmosphere that then rain back to the surface and help form the dunes is plausible.What are the implications? The vast amounts of hydrocarbons present on the Titan moon indicate that these compounds can be generated in the absence of life and in enormous quantities. Where and how they were formed can only be guessed at. Possibilities include their arrival from outer space via comets, their production in the core of Titan and subsequent migration to the surface, and their formation during the development of the moon itself. Regardless of the true origin of these hydrocarbons, their presence in such quantities must surely give us cause to consider the origins of oil on Earth. This discovery makes the abiotic oil theory seem far more credible as at least a partial explanation for the Earth's oil deposits.
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At Titan's surface temperature, water ice is as hard as rock. Cold volcanoes, called cryovolcanoes, are thought to erupt from under the icy crust, adding hills and mountains of ice to the landscape. At present it is thought there is a layer of liquid water beneath the ice crust, similar to the magma under the earth's crust. This surrounds a solid 