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Space Science

Methane Clouds on Titan 28

Posted by michael from the partly-sunny dept.
Catskul writes "Telescopes atop Mauna Kea have recorded for the first time clouds floating over Saturn's biggest moon. Astronomers used telescopes at the Keck and Gemini observatories atop the dormant volcano on the Big Island to photograph methane clouds near the south pole of the moon Titan."
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Methane Clouds on Titan More

Methane Clouds on Titan

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  • Boom. (Score:2, Funny)

    by pretoris ( 442079 )
    Anyone got a match?

    • Re:Boom. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Merlin42 ( 148225 )
      Yes I know its a joke ... but ... There is no oxygen so no boom :(
      • Yes I know its a joke ... but ... There is no oxygen so no boom :(

        Reality is just not funny. How about a better follow up:
        "Yeah but, What would methane breathing life-forms fart?"

    • There's virtually no free oxygen in Titan's atmosphere.

      Without plenty of oxygen, methane has problems burning or exploding.

  • Bacteria? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by redfiche ( 621966 ) on Thursday December 19, 2002 @10:45AM (#4922945) Journal
    Anybody know if it's active, with volcanoes, or just a lump of cold rock? If there is any source of heat like that, it seems to me the possibility of life could not be completely ruled out. Obviously nothing too complicated, but maybe something like the bacteria in the hydrothermal vent communities. Is it impossible to see through the clouds to be able to tell?

    • Re:Bacteria? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Simon Field ( 563434 )


      There are two things that make me think there is probably no life on Titan.

      One is that at 90 Kelvin, not much chemical activity goes on. Your intuition about hot spots is not unreasonable, but hot spots come and go on geological and evolutionary short timeframes, and the life formed in such a hot spot would have to get to the next hot spot across a 90 Kelvin desert. Maybe not impossible, but not really conducive to happy bacteria.

      The second reason is that the current dogma holds that life started out on Earth in a prebiotic soup that resembles Titan today, and that life modified that soup to what we see today. If there is life on Titan, it doesn't look like it has modified the soup. Perhaps it doesn't have to, but Earth-type life is all we know at this time.

      The AP article gets some things wrong that are correctly stated in the articles it points to. For example, the atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, not "methane, ethane and hydrogen cyanide".

      Also, cloud formation has been seen on Mars [aas.org] and arguably on other planets. And the idea of giving such low temperatures in Fahrenheit is ludicrous, even to people like me, who use Fahrenheit on a daily basis for the temperatures I normally encounter. I had to convert to Kelvins to get an idea of what other things (superconductors, liquification of gases) happen at those temperatures.

      • Well, the temperatures below the surface would probably be higher; most bodies of that size are capable of maintaining liquid water under a certain thickness of ice through radioactive decay - modelling even suggests that Pluto could have liquid water at depth.

        I would also suspect that the interior of Titan still undergoes some form of convection for the same reason, giving rise to hot spots that may have a surface expression.

        On the other hand, the atmosphere composition does rule out photosynthetic surface life, or in other words anything really interesting.

  • So.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by RaboKrabekian ( 461040 ) on Thursday December 19, 2002 @10:54AM (#4923033) Journal
    I guess there are a lot of cows farting on Titan.

    Ok fine. That was stupid.

  • ...could not support life... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 19, 2002 @11:17AM (#4923217)
    > The distant moon could not support life. It has an atmosphere of methane, ethane and hydrogen cyanide with no oxygen. It would also be too cold: minus 297 degrees Fahrenheit on the surface.

    Why, why, why, do they always do this? It should say "could not support life AS WE KNOW IT."

    • *sings* It's life, Jim, but not as we know it..
      We'll have to watch it carefully, if there is life there, they could be coming here next [vivausa.org]
    • > Why, why, why, do they always do this? It should say "could not support life AS WE KNOW IT."

      That should read "why do [scientists sometimes] do this?"

      You're guilty of the same error they are: making implications, ie, not saying what they 'mean.'

      I believe it's not foolhardy to speak of things in present terms: like "could not support life" meaning the only definition of life: life that is right now.

      saying that it could not support "life as we know it" seems a bit redundant. Would you ever say "The distant moon could support life as we don't know it?"

      Besides, once the moon changes or 'life or our knowledge of it' changes you can then say "The distant moon can support life."

      Or how about saying "The moon, that is distant to something, in its current state, can not support life, as we know it, but perhaps in the future the moon, that is distant to something, in its then current state, will be able to support life as we will then know it."

      I'm not holding my breath...

      • That should read "why do [scientists sometimes] do this?"
        I think you mean "Why do (so-called science) journalists so often do this?"

        My speculation:

        1. An education system which doesn't teach science worth a damn.
        2. Journalism schools and editors who don't care about accuracy in science reporting, in no small part because they are writing for a public which failed to learn science in the education system and wouldn't know the difference.
        3. An intelligentsia which doesn't hold either of the previous two to account.
    • Why, why, why, do they always do this? It should say "could not support life AS WE KNOW IT."

      Because that sounds too cliché. I know it's more accurate, but it sounds like the sort of thing that UFO freaks (that is, the far-out kind) and pseudo-scientists would say. It seems to emphasize the existence of some strange, exotic scientific principle that's just outside our realm of knowledge.

      So while "life as we know it" is more accurate, it can sound very unscientific. Journalists constantly have to balance between being perfectly accurate and being understandable (and acceptable) to the public at large. That's why you get statements like "That's more than 6 football fields in length!" That's too simplified for the scientifically-clueful readers, while "could not support life" is too general. But I don't think that anybody could read this and think that they meant that any non-earthlike life has been completely ruled out, and the writer isn't here to teach people who haven't ever considered non-earthlike life what it is.

      So don't nitpick. That one statement is not meant to be an exhaustive report on what could exist there -- it's just a general statement regarding life as we know it.

      It's like not getting into imaginary numbers in fourth-grade math. It's not that they aren't important, it's just that they're not necessary for the discussion at hand.

  • DS1 (Score:1)

    by djsable ( 257312 )
    Maybe we could send Deep Space 1 out there to take a look, since it is one of the best examples of how things SHOULD be done in NASA's history.

    Low Cost (comparitively) and Durable (lasts far beyond mission parameters) is really the way to go.

    There are so many interesting things in our own solar system, we should make a DS2 or something to just scoot around the system taking pictures for us to marvel over.

    Never underestimate the power of pretty space pictures [nasa.gov] to excite the mind.

    • Re:DS1 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by EvilBastard ( 77954 ) on Thursday December 19, 2002 @04:35PM (#4925802) Homepage
      Perhaps you should familiarise yourself with Cassini-Huygens [nasa.gov]

      If it takes 6 years to get there, you want to be able to do as much as possible, rather then do the equivilant of 'You know, we should have brought that metric set of spanners' when you get there.

      Cheap, low cost is OK for scouting and test missions, where the turnaround time is short. Say the Moon, Mars, Venus and testing engine designs

      Saturn is a bloody long way away. Cassini is the orbiter, and Huygens is going to go way beyond 'Pretty Picutres' - it's going to enter Titan's atmosphere, land in the ocean and perform spectral analysis on anything it can find.

      Low Cost is a waste of time here - you want it to work first time, keep working and not break, otherwise it'll be 10 years before we build another one and get back there.

      I see no reason at all to 'Scoot around taking pictures' - Been There [nasa.gov] Done That [nasa.gov]. Let's try something new and risky for a change.
  • "The cloud observations are based on views from atop Mauna Kea in late 2001 and earlier this year. Titan, one of 30 moons orbiting Saturday, is a little less than half the size of Earth, and much larger than Earth's moon."

    Saturday? Man, somebody needs a better proofreader.
  • Really, really nice pix, somewhat crummy press release:

    "Although some planets, most notably Jupiter, are covered in clouds, it's the first time the process of evaporation and cloud formation has been spotted in space, said Caltech scientist Michael Brown."

    I've watched evaporative process cloud formation on Mars... that's been witnessed for a least a hundred years.

    But of course cloud formation on Mars or Titan does not take place in "space". Sigh.

  • From the press release [hawaii.edu]:

    "These are the most spectacular images of Titan's surface which we've seen to date," said Dr. Michael Brown, lead author of the Caltech paper. "They are so detailed that we can almost begin to speculate about Titan's geology, if only we knew for certain what the bright and dark regions represented."

    Yeah, if we only had that one missing datum... Seems to me that what they have right now is the planetological equivalent of a rorschach test. But why should that stop the speculation, rampant or otherwise? Just assume a working interpretation and work from there. I'll even start. The "bright and dark regions" could represent:
    • Highlands and lowlands.
    • Continents and seas.
    • Younger surface and older surface.
    • Desert and methane-breathing vegetation.
    • Open plains and urban sprawl.
    • Vanilla and chocolate.
    • Men and Orcs.
    • Skin and fur.
    Just pick one and run with it, guys!
  • It is the work of the terrorist

    "Hous Bin Phaartin"

  • Pffft. That's no big deal. I "discover" methane clouds in my office all the time.
  • Who Farted?

    If we could answer that question we may also know that we aren't alone in the universe. All by figuring out "Who farted?"

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