US EditionSaturn’s moon Titan may not have a buried ocean as long suspected, new study suggests
Reanalysis of Cassini data shows Titan's interior is a slushy ice layer with liquid water pockets, not a global ocean, with liquid volume comparable to the Atlantic Ocean, NASA says.
- Published Wednesday in Nature, the study led by Flavio Petricca found Titan lacks a global subsurface ocean and instead has a slushy layer with melt pockets.
- Reanalyzing Cassini radio tracking and gravity measurements, researchers found a 15-hour delay between Saturn's peak pull and Titan's bulge, explained better by viscous slush than a global ocean.
- Modeling indicates a 6-mile-thick ice crust over slush, with melt pockets reaching 68 degrees Fahrenheit near Titan's rocky core.
- NASA's Dragonfly mission, set to launch as soon as 2028, can test subsurface predictions on Titan, while if confirmed, the result reshapes the search for life and ocean worlds' prevalence.
- Over long timescales, the presence of hot ice will circularize Titan's orbit in about 30 million years, and researchers say Titan likely froze from a past ocean, altering extraterrestrial environments.
75 Articles
75 Articles
A thorough reanalysis of data from more than a decade ago indicates that Titan, the largest moon in...
Titan, one of Saturn's moons, may eventually have no underground ocean, say American and European astronomers.
NASA discovers Titan doesn’t have an ocean, but a ‘slushy ice layer’ that increases possibility of life
For nearly two decades, the prime location for finding life beyond Earth was a truly alien world: Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. Beneath its thick orange atmosphere — comparable to Earth’s — and its lakes and seas of methane, a global ocean of liquid water seemed to lie hidden, buried under kilometers of ice. Now, a new study led by NASA scientists forces us to rethink this image: Titan doesn’t harbor a subsurface ocean, but rather an immense lay…
According to scientists, it could rather contain deep layers of ice and melted snow.
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