| Online: | |
| Visits: | |
| Stories: |
| Story Views | |
| Now: | |
| Last Hour: | |
| Last 24 Hours: | |
| Total: | |
How Much Can Titan’s Sunsets Teach Us About Alien Planets?
An illustration of a Titanic lake by Ron Miller. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
Titan — that smoggy, orangy moon circling Saturn — is of great interest to exobiologists because its chemistry could be good for life. It has a thick atmosphere of nitrogen and methane and likely has lakes filled with liquid hydrocarbons, and scientists believe there is enough light filtering down into the atmosphere to drive chemical reactions.
It turns out the moon could also be a good analog to help us understand the atmospheres of exoplanets far beyond our solar system. From looking at sunsets on the moon, scientists led by NASA believe that a thick atmosphere could influence how we perceive a planet from afar.
(…)
Read the rest of How Much Can Titan’s Sunsets Teach Us About Alien Planets? (349 words)
© Elizabeth Howell for Universe Today, 2014. |
Permalink |
No comment |
Post tags:
Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh
Source: http://www.universetoday.com/112204/how-much-can-titans-sunsets-teach-us-about-alien-planets/
