SPACE — The magical island floating on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, finally has a scientific explanation. Scientists believe it is a glacier-like mass of snow shaped like a honeycomb.
The islands were first seen in 2014 by the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft as it peered through the orange haze surrounding Titan. For your information, Titan is larger than the planet Mercury.
Appearing as shifting points of light above lakes of liquid methane and ethane, the islands have left scientists struggling to explain them. No one can know how these temporary blocks can appear, then disappear, from observation to observation.
However, new research led by Xinting Yu, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Texas San Antonio, shows that the magic islands are actually chunks of porous frozen organic solids. It floats in a shape similar to a honeycomb.
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Presumably, these solids accumulated after snow fell from Titan’s sky. Research published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, Thursday, January 4 2024.
“I wanted to investigate whether the magic island was really an organic material floating on the surface, like pumice that can float in water on Earth before sinking,” Yu said in a statement.
The magical island of Titan is Real
Theories developed to explain the magical island of Titan have been divided into two rough categories. On the one hand, there are those who think these islands look like ghosts, and on the other hand say these objects must be physically real.
In the ghost category, there are suggestions that the island may be caused by waves in the methane or ethane lakes on Titan. It may even be formed by a series of bubbles associated with fizzing material beneath the liquid.
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But Yu discovers the distinctly non-ghostly nature of Titan’s magical island when he takes a closer look. He saw how Titan’s atmosphere, which is 50 thicker than Earth’s and rich in methane and other organic molecules, is connected to liquid lakes and dark sand dunes across its surface.
Titan’s upper atmosphere is dense with organic molecules that can clump together, freeze, and then fall as snow onto the moon’s surface. Next, it enters the serene rivers and lakes of methane and ethane that dot the alien landscape.
To see whether that could explain the magical islands, the team had to find out whether the complex organic molecules of Titan’s snow would dissolve as soon as they hit liquid lakes and rivers. The researchers determined that because this liquid was packed or saturated with organic molecules, dissolution could not occur.
2024-01-09 12:17:00
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