Titan's air warms the surface and its sky cools it: the greenhouse effect adds about 38 degrees Fahrenheit while the high-altitude haze subtracts about 16, leaving the surface about 22 degrees warmer than Titan's effective temperature

Titan's air warms the surface and its sky cools it: the greenhouse effect adds about 38 degrees Fahrenheit while the high-altitude haze subtracts about 16, leaving the surface about 22 degrees warmer than Titan's effective temperature

Planetary atmospheres can warm and cool at once, and Titan makes the split unusually clear. Saturn’s biggest moon has an atmosphere that heats its ground and a sky that chills it. The numbers on each side are large, so the tug-of-war between them is the whole point. What’s left after both effects fight it out is a surprisingly small margin. All of this traces back to a single paper. In 1991, Christopher McKay, James Pollack and Régis Courtin pub…