US EditionSaturn’s moon Titan may not have a buried ocean as long suspected, new study suggests
Reanalysis of Cassini data shows Titan's interior is a slushy ice layer with liquid water pockets, not a global ocean, with liquid volume comparable to the Atlantic Ocean, NASA says.
- Published Wednesday in Nature, the study led by Flavio Petricca found Titan lacks a global subsurface ocean and instead has a slushy layer with melt pockets.
- Reanalyzing Cassini radio tracking and gravity measurements, researchers found a 15-hour delay between Saturn's peak pull and Titan's bulge, explained better by viscous slush than a global ocean.
- Modeling indicates a 6-mile-thick ice crust over slush, with melt pockets reaching 68 degrees Fahrenheit near Titan's rocky core.
- NASA's Dragonfly mission, set to launch as soon as 2028, can test subsurface predictions on Titan, while if confirmed, the result reshapes the search for life and ocean worlds' prevalence.
- Over long timescales, the presence of hot ice will circularize Titan's orbit in about 30 million years, and researchers say Titan likely froze from a past ocean, altering extraterrestrial environments.
87 Articles
87 Articles
Astrobiologists have long considered Saturn's moon Titan and Jupiter's moon Europa to be the best places to look for extraterrestrial life. Newly published research is now putting a damper on those hopes: Titan does not have a liquid ocean, and Europa's icy crust is much thicker than expected.
Whoops! We May Have Been Wrong About That Whole ‘Underground Ocean On Saturn’s Moon’ Thing
One of my favorite things about my freshman year of college wasn't the hitting clubs or going to frat parties. That's mainly because I didn't do either of those things, so, instead, I was digging my General Astronomy class.I had a cool professor who taught us about all kinds of space stuff, but would also dip into some fun stuff like explaining why Han Solo has no clue what a parsec is.Since parsecs measure distance, not time, what does it mean …
A thorough reanalysis of data from more than a decade ago indicates that Titan, the largest moon in...
Titan, one of Saturn's moons, may eventually have no underground ocean, say American and European astronomers.
Coverage Details
Bias Distribution
- 62% of the sources are Center
Factuality
To view factuality data please Upgrade to Premium
