Titan is moving away from Saturn about 11 centimetres every year — roughly 100 times faster than scientists once believed — suggesting the moon may have begun its life much closer to the planet

Titan is moving away from Saturn about 11 centimetres every year — roughly 100 times faster than scientists once believed — suggesting the moon may have begun its life much closer to the planet

Titan is not staying where Saturn put it. The giant moon is moving outward by about 11 centimetres each year, a tiny distance on a human scale and a surprisingly large one in the slow accounting of planetary systems. Earth’s Moon recedes from us by about 3.8 centimetres a year. Titan is retreating almost three times faster despite orbiting much farther from its planet than our Moon does from Earth. The result came from Cassini data and was publi…