Radio Wave on Saturn's Moon Hints at Hidden Ocean

SleepyHappyDoc writes "The European Space Agency has announced that a mysterious radio wave may indicate the existence of a hidden ocean underneath the surface of Titan. The Cassini-Huygens spaceprobe, which entered Titan's atmosphere over two years ago, collected evidence and information which has led to this potential discovery. This technology may lead to entirely new ways of finding out information about other planets."

people have suspected this before

[Anonymous Coward]

People have suspected this before, since the core is hot, and there is frozen methane on the surface, isn't it obvious there should be a liquids in the middle layer?

Question is, is there underground life? If so what the heck does it look like and what does it do?

I hope the Huygens probe hasn't contaminated the environment my spreading earth bacteria.

"Mysterious wave"

[N7DR]

The European Space Agency has announced that a mysterious radio wave...

And there's no point in reading TFA in order to try to remove any of the mystery. Frequency? Duration? Periodicity/repeatability? Any characteristics whatsoever? Not a single useful property is mentioned in the article. In fact, apparently it's not even certain that it's not an artifact.

Actually, the whole thing is a rather weird: not only do they not give any details whatsoever, but I find it difficult to countenance that a scientist would talk about a "radio wave" rather than a "signal" or "emission" in this context. Speaking from my background as a co-investigator on the Planetary Radio Astronomy experiment on Voyager, the word "wave" is usually reserved for theoretical treatments in published papers.

Anyway, I guess we just have to wait for the upcoming issue of "Planetary and Space Science" to see what the article is really talking about.

Works here on earth too

[leighklotz]

>On Earth, radio waves occur naturally during lightning strikes, which cause electrons in the atmosphere to oscillate and release the waves. These radio waves bounce back and forth between the Earth's surface and its ionosphere, the high-up region of the atmosphere filled with electrically-charged particles.

I do this myself on earth a lot. It's lot of fun to experiment.

In the past month, I was able to bounce a radio wave of approximately 20 meters to 40 meters in length from California to Hawaii [wa5znu.org], Mexico [wa5znu.org], Australia [wa5znu.org], the Bering Sea [wa5znu.org], Pacific Islands [wa5znu.org], Vladivostok [wa5znu.org], Khabarosk [wa5znu.org] (Russia 20km from Chinese border, where they had the chemical spill [google.com] a couple of years ago), and South Africa [wa5znu.org].

Some of this was with off-on keying of an RF carrier, and some with digital-signal processing software running on Linux (both extremely weak signal [pe2pe.eu] modes originally designed for bouncing signals off the Moon, and more conversational [wa5znu.org] modes.)