1. principles
  2. Come On In, the Methane's Fine

Come On In, the Methane's Fine

By drorzel on January 4, 2007.

The Times has an article announcing the discovery of methane lakes on Titan:

The discovery, reported yesterday by an international team of researchers, was made by a radar survey of Titan's high northern latitudes by the Cassini spacecraft, which has been orbiting Saturn and its retinue of satellites since July 2004. One of the mission's major objectives is the investigation of Titan's environment, thought to be a frigid version of conditions on the primordial Earth.

The radar imaging system detected more than 75 dark patches in the landscape near Titan's northern polar region, the scientists said in a detailed description of the find published today in the journal Nature.

Here's a link to the Nature issue in question, but as they're total bastards, you can't even read the news item about the results without a subscription.

It's a good time to be a planetary scientist.

Tags
Astronomy
In the News
Science

More like this

The Sirens of Titan
"Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody." -Mark Twain Back before the telescope was invented, Saturn was known as the Old Man of the Skies. The slowest-moving of the naked-eye planets, it's the only one that would reliably be in nearly the same location, year after…
The Nile Isn't Just A River in Egypt Any More. It's also on the moon
But not that moon. Saturn's moon. And it is not really the Nile. But, just as the Nile is one of the longest rivers on Earth, this new river is the longest river observed anywhere other than the earth. Yay Earth, you have the Longest Rivers known to Earthlings! Scientists with NASA's Cassini…
NASA announced key pre-selected Discovery Missions
Today, NASA announced three future key missions preselected as part of the Discovery program named GEMS, TiME and Comet Hopper. This is an important announcement, which was eagerly expected by our community. The NASA Discovery program is a low-cost mission ($425 million FY2010) program aimed at…
Sirens of Titan Less Impossible than Previously Thought
Just so you know, scientists do not seem to be able to detect the difference between a 3 foot and a 30 foot deformation of the surface of a planetoid body that is about one and a half billion kilometers away, and we know this because NASA's Cassini space ship had to actually go all the way to one…

It is indeed a good time to be a scientist. Discovery of methane leads to a mystery of how it is produced. This may even invoke Thomas Gold's hypothesis that a planet can produce hydrocarbons.