Titan Brings Forth Proof of Its Ocean

“Whether life has ever evolved on Titan is another question, but whether it did or didn’t, Titan can tell us about the chemical processes that ultimately lead to life,” Lorenz told SPACE.com.

Considered the sixth planet from the sun, Saturn is the second largest planet in the Solar System after the planet Jupiter. Classified as a gas planet with a prominent system of rings, approximately 60 moons are known to orbit Saturn. The largest moon of Saturn and the second largest moon in the Solar System, Titan is the only moon to have an atmosphere that is recognized as significant.

Recently, under Titan’s thick and planet-like atmosphere, it has been discovered there may be an ocean that possibly has some form of life available. The Cassini-Huygens mission has revealed the Saturn surface, consisting of icy mountains, oily lakes and seas, and cryovolcanoes with water and ammonia spraying out of their depths.

Not a new thing, scientists have suspected that Titan may have an underground ocean as do Jupiter’s moons—Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa. “Models of heat flow in Titan’s interior suggested years ago that Titan would likely have an internal water or water-ammonia ocean,” said Ralph Lorenz, a Cassini radar team member at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Md.
Data gathered from the Cassini-Huygens mission found evidence Titan’s surface was moving. As we were mapping Titan’s surface, we were building maps up in little strips. Some of these strips overlapped, help tying the map together, but when you looked at where the features were in one strip compared with another strip, the coordinates weren’t the same,” Lorenz explained.

What was found by the scientists was the winds on Titan actually rock the moon back and forth on its axis. Influencing Titan on its spins, the winds are accelerating the moon’s rotation speed. And as the winds change with Titan’s seasons, it can be decelerated. “Titan’s winds should spool up and spin down with the seasons, and because Titan’s atmosphere is so massive and Titan is relatively small, the winds have a measurable impact on Titan’s rotation,” Lorenz said. “If you adjust the parameters of how Titan rotates very slightly, we could make the features on the maps match up.”

Similar to Earth, winds blowing here change the length of a day by about one millisecond over a year’s duration. The difference lies in the atmosphere of Titan, as it is more massive with a light crust, which causes the changes to be larger and more pronounced.