Methane Clouds on Titan

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."

Comments

Re:Bacteria?

[Simon Field]

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 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.