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Titan May Have Water Ocean Under the Surface
RedEaredSlider writes "NASA's Cassini probe, in orbit around Saturn, may have discovered evidence for a liquid water ocean under the surface of Titan, Saturn's largest moon. The data comes from radar observations of the surface that measure Titan's rotation and tell how it is oriented relative to the plane of its orbit — its axial tilt. According to a paper to be published in an upcoming issue of Astronomy and Astrophysics (preprint PDF at arXiv.org), the new data showed that many of the planet's surface features were in the wrong place, sometimes off by as much as 30 kilometers (19 miles). Titan always presents the same face toward Saturn, just like the Moon does to Earth. But in those situations, one expects that the moon will be in the 'Cassini state,' which means that the axial tilt will have a certain value. In Titan's case, the axial tilt was measured at 0.3 degrees. That seemed too high if one assumed Titan was a solid body."
Sort of reminds me of lyrics from the Talking Heads song "Once In A Life Time"
" under the rocks and stones there is water"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1wg1DNHbNU
Haven't they been saying this for a while now??? I remember seeing something like this a while back
Nothing here... So... SHOOO!!!
It doesn't matter, apart from an interesting scientific study. Once they are able to get people to the moon or mars profitably, then we can start worrying about water.
I really doubt this. If you wikipedia titan moon you'll see the temperature is -179 degrees celius.
At what pressure beneath the surface? Remember, water is a weirdo substance where liquid takes up less volume than solid. increase the pressure enough and H2O below 0C will still be liquid. Plus, -179C is the surface temperature. Perhaps the core is warmer?
Yep, I think the internal heat is tidally generated like Europa. Saturn's gravity stretches Titan at some times more than others, and this stretching causes friction and generates internal heat.
Agreed. Looking at the paper they noticed the moon's axial tilt doesn't match current theories. So they assumed the moon had a water ocean, calculated what the characteristics of that water ocean would need to be to explain the discrepancy and said, "see, it's possible".
So they assumed the moon had a water ocean
Nope. Previous research concluded Titan's body consists of about half rock and half water ice. They are saying some of that water ice is actually liquid. They aren't assuming anything, but rather just building on prior research like normal.
I hope I live long enough to see them get a probe through the ice into the water of either Europa or Titan. It would be SO cool to see some form of alien life living there. At 44, I figure they better get moving, I got about 40 years...
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
new data showed that many of the planet's surface features were in the wrong place, sometimes off by as much as 30 kilometers (19 miles).
I find it hard to take seriously any "scientific" paper which refers to Titan as a planet rather than a moon.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
The existence of liquid water on Europa is already pretty much a done deal due to the surface features that have been photographed. Richard Greenberg's "Unmasking Europa" is a particularly interesting read on the subject in my opinion as he outlines a strong case that the ice is much thinner than some planetary scientists believe. There are regions on the surface known as 'chaos' that appear to be formed by melt through from beneath the surface. Interestingly the celestial mechanics pointed to very high tidal forces on the Galilean moons just before the first Voyager probe arrived there and almost immediately found the incredibly actively volcanic Io.
If there is water beneath Titan's surface I would imagine that it represents a much more difficult target for a drill/melt through probe than Europa, because of the thick atmosphere and the unknown rigidity of the surface, as well as the dangers of landing in liquid. Having said that, it's great to have more potential habitats in the solar system. Enceladus's ice plumes indicate possible pockets of water below the icy crust there too.
The Europa-Jupiter System mission is scheduled for 2020 and should give a much richer pool of data on Europa, the Galileo probe sadly malfunctioned and was only able to provide a tiny fraction of the data that was intended, so there are relatively few high resolution photos available of Europa. The entire Europa catalogue can fit on one CD. The EJSM mission should also be able to settle the issue of just how thick the ice on Europa is. In his book Greenberg argues that the entire surface is recycled on the order of every few hundred thousand years at most, meaning that material from the surface could be cycled down to the ocean below, which would boost the chances of some kind of life existing considerably.
One thing we can be pretty sure of is that if life is detected on Europa, we have to conclude that life is very likely indeed to be commonplace in the Universe.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
They better welcome there new human overlords.
The hypothesis that Titan may have liquids present has been around for a long time. And it used the orbit shape since its basis from the very beginning. That is why Huygens atmospheric probe was designed to float just in case.
However Huygens landed on a solid surface even though it was aimed at an area that had an appearance of a liquid. As far as I know the probe did not detect any evidence of liquids near the landing site nor from the aerial imagery. As such, I was under the impression that this hypothesis was disproved.
If there were underground bodies of water present, surely Huygens would of picked up evidence of this in the atmosphere. Just seems like rather than working on other explanations for the orbit scientists still cling to the same assumptions with a little more justification.