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titan

There are only a handful of places in the solar system that experience any kind of weather as nosotros'd define information technology on Globe, and no unmarried body that experiences the sheer range of conditions and events as we accept here. Dust storms, for example, are only known to occur on Globe and Mars — but now, we've picked them upwardly on the moon of Titan as well.

Titan, Saturn's largest moon, is intriguing to astronomers and scientists considering information technology represents a partial snapshot of what conditions on the early on Earth might have been like, albeit at dramatically lower temperatures. With its thick atmosphere, Titan has a marsh gas bike instead of a water cycle, with liquid hydrocarbon lakes on its surface. Its surface features are shaped past rain and wind. There's no sign of plate tectonics, but scientists have identified structures that might be cryovolcanoes, implying that Titan's geological history has been shaped in part by icy jets of frozen material rather than magma from the planet'south curtain or cadre. And at present, scientists have picked upwardly evidence of grit storms for the offset fourth dimension, making Titan the third location (apart from Globe and Mars) to exist known to feature these types of storms.

These findings are courtesy of Cassini, which may have dropped into Saturn some years ago but is nevertheless contributing to our larger knowledge of the creation. Titan is the only body in the solar arrangement beyond Earth where liquid rain and pools of fluid are known to exist on the surface. Every bit the lord's day warms the moon, especially effectually the equinox, it can create tremendous storms. By studying the storms, researchers gradually adamant that they had features that made it incommunicable for them to be basis-based phenomena. They were focused in the area directly over Titan's equatorial belt of sand dunes, implying the new features are straight tied to the dunes beneath them.

NASA/ESA/IPGP/Labex UnivEarthS/University Paris Diderot

"We believe that the Huygens Probe, which landed on the surface of Titan in January 2005, raised a modest corporeality of organic dust upon arrival due to its powerful aerodynamic wake," said Sebastien Rodriguez, an astronomer at the Université Paris Diderot, France, and the paper's atomic number 82 author. "But what we spotted here with Cassini is at a much larger calibration. The near-surface wind speeds required to heighten such an amount of dust equally we run into in these grit storms would have to exist very strong — nigh v times every bit strong as the average wind speeds estimated past the Huygens measurements virtually the surface and with climate models."

Finding dust storms on Titan implies the surface is regularly remodeled past surface erosion as well. Liquid erosion has previously been thought to be quite slow on Titan, but the methane grit clouds beingness diddled around on the surface should still play some outcome on shaping the geography of the moon. We're still teasing out the various forces that shape the cold globe. It'due south idea that Titan's thick atmosphere cuts the number of touch on craters on the surface by one-half by slowing objects as they enter the temper, but exactly how quickly erosion takes place or how much a part equatorial dust storms play in the process is nevertheless unknown.

Despite its phenomenal differences from Earth, i can argue that Titan — with its atmosphere, surface liquid, and weather condition patterns — is, overall, the closest object to Earth in the entire solar system. Finding massive dust storms just further emphasizes how much alike our respective worlds are.

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