Is There a Subsurface Water Ocean On Titan?

Stirling Newberry writes "Luciano Iess and team have hypothesized that Titan joins Earth, Europa, and Ganymede as ocean worlds. They measured the size of the tidal bulges and found that the moon is likely not solid (abstract). Team member Jonathan Lunine points out that Titan's methane atmosphere is not stable, so it needs some source, perhaps from outgassing. On Earth, water means life, and in the future, ice covered ocean worlds are targets for human colonization. As the late Arthur C. Clarke observed, water is the most precious substance in the universe to humans."

Comments

Re:Who cares

[Stirling Newberry]

Since statistically speaking, many of that 99.9% hold a creationist view of the earth, it won't make a difference, but it really should. Imagine for a moment life that might exist near hot vents in a Titanian inner ocean, which would teach us more about the possibilities, or lack their of, for life in a myriad of environments, than we have learned in all the time that science has existed at all. Consider that of the large icy bodies, more of them are potential harbors for life than the rocky bodies, and the earth has life in water under ice as well. From what we know of exo-planets, ice-ocean worlds might be far more numerous havens for life than atmospheric rocky worlds.