This artist’s concept envisions what hydrocarbon ice forming on the liquid hydrocarbon seas of Saturn’s moon Titan might look like. A new model from scientists on NASA’s Cassini mission suggests that clumps of methane-and-ethane-rich ice - shown here as the lighter-colored clusters - could float under some conditions.
It's not exactly icing on a cake, but it could be icing on a lake. A new paper, by a Cornell astronomy graduate student as lead author, finds that blocks of hydrocarbon ice could decorate the surface of liquid hydrocarbon lakes and seas on Saturn's moon Titan. The presence of ice floes could explain some of the mixed readings NASA's Cassini mission has seen in the reflectivity of the surfaces of lakes on Titan. "We now know it's possible to get methane-and-ethane-rich ice freezing over on Titan in thin blocks that congeal together as it gets colder - similar to what we see with Arctic sea ice at the onset of winter," said Jason Hofgartner, first author on the paper and a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Scholar at Cornell. "We'll want to take these conditions into consideration if we ever decide to explore the Titan surface some day." Titan is the only other body in our solar system with stable bodies of liquid on its surface. But while Earth's cycle of precipitation and evaporation involves water, Titan's involves hydrocarbons like ethane and methane. Ethane and methane are organic molecules, which scientists think can be building blocks for the more complex chemistry from which life arose.
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