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Pictures of Titan's Lakes
sighted writes "For decades, scientists have wondered if the thick orange haze that shrouds Saturn's giant moon Titan hid lakes of liquid methane on the surface, but there was no way to confirm it, until now. The Cassini flyby of July 22, 2006 took these striking images and were released today."
Or...God has a leaky blue pen
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Swimming in liquid farts
I spend most of my time in bed, darling.
Pretty cool stuff.
I heard they wander around the Solar system wrecking anything they see.
You mean "more evidence suggesting liquid"?
Hardly proof.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
...of a ringworld actually. Now to texture map it to a 3D model of one.
This other location at the Cassini site, and this older article from the BBC.
The original article is in the journal Nature, but you need a subscription to view it. You can still read the abstract, though.
I'm surprised this isn't being reported as evidence that cows once lived on Titan.
Maybe the methane came from Uranus? Sorry. :)
Hi, my name is Anonymous Coward, and I think there are lakes on Titan because of this wikipedia link [wikipedia.org]. What do other Slashdotters think??
I can understand that if we found liquid water elsewhere in the solar system it should make news, but who cares about liquid methane? Afterall Jupiter (http://www.nineplanets.org/jupiter.html) has "exotic" liquid metallic hydrogen and liquid helium. I doubt it is possible to drive any biologically important reactions at the temperatures present on Titan. We simply confirmed that our knowledge of the methane phase diagram is correct. Let me know if they find something useful, like platinum or palladium on Phobos...
Why did it take them 6 months to release the images?
unzip ; strip ; touch ; grep ; find ; finger ; mount ; fsck ; more ; yes ; fsck ; umount ; sleep
It was renamed to Urectum, just to end that lame joke once and for all.
it is good that the liqid question is answered, as liquid methane is somthing that some view as possible environ of life, just as those who believe water on Mars means likely life. The issue though is whether conditions were ever favorable enough, long enough for life to develope. If we establish Titan's parameters, and Mar's parameters, we might come up with some of the values in drakes equation http://www.activemind.com/Mysterious/Topics/SETI/d rake_equation.html
the answeres might not be what we want, however
A fun read. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(Stephen_Baxter )
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
...The whole ringworld!
It could last from a persons teens, into middle age, with no repeats...
Could be you would turn Into a pak before finishing...
I just want One trip into a planet at high speed in a General Products hull. (With stasis field at the end, of course...but that last second would look really cool!)
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
Those look just like Earth lakes! Titan looks like a nice place to live. Maybe I'll retire there someday.
"The pen is blue! The pen is blue! The goddamn pen is blue!"
This is my signature. soid st egr.hyTa rsiugm usnin Any questions?
From another page about this at NASA (emphasis added):
The images are blatantly false-colour. The "blue" areas meant to potray liquid (making people think of water) but could just as easily be ice or lava flows.
Am I the only one who can remember that we put a lander on Titan a good 18 months prior to taking this image? The presence of liquid methane on the surface was confirmed one week later. Nice image, bad caption.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
>It could last from a persons teens, into middle age, with no repeats...
It took me that long to read all the books, although I could have done without "Throne."
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
So, did they finally find the Sirens?
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
...except Minnesota seems way colder that Titan.
... have known it for a long time.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
Wow, Finally a way to get this administration to fund space exploration. Petroleum.
Now if we could only start a rumor there are weapons of mass destruction, terrorist training camps, and Oceans of petroleum product on Titan, we could leave Iraq, and start a gold rush like rocket race to Saturn's moon.
Ye Ha , lakes full or petro.
Cheers
* Carthago Delenda Est *
... or is the lake near the middle of the picture shaped like a giant fish? No wonder the Face on Mars has vanished, he's gone fishing on Titan!
One of the rocks out there might be wet. Possibly. Well, that was 3.26 billion dollars well spent. (http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/faq/mission.cfm)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Well my arrows are made of desire
From far away as Jupiters sulphur mines
Say my arrows are made of desire
From far away as Jupiters sulphur mines
(Way down by the Methane Sea)
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
If you don't produce a steady stream of non-achievements people might start saying things like "Hey, what did that 3.26 billion dollars (http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/faq/mission.cfm) we just gave you for the Cassini project actually accomplish?" This way, you can say "Hey, the Cassini project CONFIRMED the existence of LIQUID which is almost like WATER which is a prerequisite for LIFE which would be the BIGGEST DISCOVERY EVER."
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Dad? Is it really you?
If I were Bin Laden (which I'm not btw) I'd think seriously about getting a life sized model of myself up to Titan. The sight of it floating in one of those methane lakes would take the pressure off for sure.
Cue 80's band.... (The Creatures was the best music ever to come out of Siouxie and the Banshees)
PLUTO DRIVE (The Creatures)
Let's go to Pluto, the atmosphere's clear
We'll be really cool there, with nothing to fear
Let's go to Pluto, it's cold and it's damp
Where children are heroes, death is high camp
I want to see Pluto, I want to have fun
I want to turn blue under an alien sun
Oh let me see Pluto, it seems such a gas
With oceans of methane and petrified grass
CHORUS:
Let's go to Pluto
Let's live on the dot
See the bad moon rising
In a lunacy knot
Come on let's do Pluto, it's really not far
An unleaded dream drive to the prettiest star
I want to see Pluto, but maybe I'll wait
'Til the world turns to meet its plutonium fate
The days will be long here, the years will be more
Let's go to Pluto, like we did before
CHORUS:
Let's go to Pluto
Let's live on the dot
See the bad moon rising
In a lunacy knot.
etc.
LOL, he was making a joke about the fact that fart gas is methane and there are oceans of liquid methane on Titan. He didn't ask for a complete analysis of fart gas and whether it's possible to liquefy a fart and the liquid still technically consist of "fart" material.
:) So, you can relax and no worry about getting caught!
At least if you fart while you're swimming, your bubbles might not make it to the surface for everyone to see cause they might liquefy and join the existing liquid methane
Hey, there are pretty pictures, too. Plus, I can think of 355 billion dollars spent a lot less wisely.
Looks more like to me they found Halo, took it's heightmap data and are trying to say they actually saw something on Titan.
I don't think this is conclusive. As one of the other earlier posts said, they have taken the rough areas and coloured them rock colour, and taken the smooth areas and coloured them water colour. At the edge of these 'lake' features there are intermediate regions which are pretty flat and might be either shallow lake or a flat shore. Or something else completly different.
The article suggests we will in time know what we have. It is probably not sand because there aren't any dunes. If they are lakes, then the lake height ought to change with the seasons. In the meantime colouring it blue isn't really helping.
When I was a lad, Venus was believed to have huge oceans of soda water. Mars had a canal system. Tintin 'Destination Moon' book had underground ice on the moon. In the last fifty years we have visited all sorts of extraordinary places, and everywhere has turned out to be pretty dry. The lander shots of Titan looked just like a coastline, but that was not wet. There is an intriguing trickle of something in a crater on Mars. So far, the more we look, the less we find, and the more sceptical I get. Is this sort of thing really necessary to get funding for space exploration?
"There's farts in them thar hills!" doesn't have the same appeal.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Given two arguments, one expressing two possible explanations for the evidence (the high radar absorption) and discounting one of these due to its unlikelihood, and another one saying "All the evidence for water before turned out to be wrong" the former is much more convincing. Because it is a scientific argument based on evidence. The false colour is irrelevant - the areas of low radar reflection still need an explanation, and "lake" is currently the most likely. You also seem to be under the impression that these are water lakes, which they are not.
Furthermore, they have not taken the rough areas and coloured them rock, etc, they have taken the dark areas and coloured them blueish, and the light areas brown. Smoothness has nothing to do with it, since this is not a height map but a radar reflection map.
im in ur
I have heard Cassini called a Cadillac, Battlestar Galactica,..., but never cheap! Increased spatial resolution won't help you see 50 km diameter lakes any better. The embayment relationships with topography are the same, as is the radar darkness of the lake surface. It might detect tributary streams. I suppose an extremely powerful radar might see waves on the lake surface. Cassini may even be able to detect those locally.
an ill wind that blows no good
For the record, liquid water on Mmars hasn't been ruled out. Maybe you missed it, but a few weeks ago they found new channels that appear to have been formed by flowing water.
You honestly believe that the Earth is the only place in the Universe that ANY form of matter can be found in a liquid state?
Wow, the odds that one of the three fundamental states of matter exists on only one of the trillions of rocks in the universe are so poor it actually boggles the mind to contemplate how poor they are. I mean, there are a lot of forms of matter and they turn liquid at different temps. Each of those rocks floating around out there houses lots of different forms of matter and each contains a different temperature range. Each of the trillions of rocks has what, a few thousand potential liquids and if even one, anywhere, has even a drop of liquid then you are wrong. It doesn't have to be life bringing liquid, after all the methane lakes they are talking about here couldn't support any form of life that we know of.
Okay..... No one light a match.
Could we Nuke it and make it a flaming moon? Or does methane only burn in the presence of oxygen?
Anytime we find something on a new planet, the most important question is "Will it burn?"
Sometimes scientists see what they want to see (because it's their pet theory or because it will capture them headlines/grant money). Sometimes the data turns out to be bad, or unexpectedly flawed.
We'll see. But let's not start patting anyone on the back until we have some more solid corroborating data.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I have been out of the planetary science business for a long time. I am not aware of any studies relating Titan's general circulation (which must be well known) to observable wave height on lakes. Does the low gravity, (presumably) high surface stress, and large lake size create large waves? The circulation is already known to be vigorous to produce ice-sand dunes. That would make an interesting Master's project. I don't think there are *any* other driving mechanisms other than wind.
an ill wind that blows no good
Well, I have no problems with that. Reservation is something that seems all to often to be lacking, from all kinds of people.
im in ur