Odd bright patches on Saturn moon Titan are dry lake beds

Written by Mike Wall on June 19, 2020. Posted in Current News

A perplexing Saturn moon mystery appears to be solved at long last.

Strange bright patches observed in the southern tropical regions of Saturn’s biggest moon, Titan, more than a decade ago are likely the beds of dried-up hydrocarbon lakes and seas, a new study reports.

The results could shed light on Titan’s climate history and also inform the hunt for potentially habitable environments on alien planets, study team members said.

Between the years 2000 and 2008, the big radio telescopes at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia spotted about a dozen anomalously bright regions on the 3,200-mile-wide (5,150 kilometers) Titan, the second-largest moon in the solar system.

At the time, the patches were viewed as likely evidence of lakes or seas on Titan, which was widely expected to harbor such bodies, said study lead author Jason Hofgartner, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

That early expectation was borne out after NASA’s Cassini spacecraft arrived in orbit around Saturn in 2004. Cassini observed many lakes and seas on Titan and showed that the moon has an active weather system based on liquid hydrocarbons. Methane and ethane fall from the sky as rain, course down river systems and pool in lakes and seas, some of which are bigger than North America’s Great Lakes.

Titan remains the only cosmic body beyond Earth known to harbor bodies of stable liquid on its surface.

But the lakes spotted by Cassini sit primarily near Titan’s poles, especially the moon’s far northern reaches. The probe didn’t see bodies of liquid where the patches detected by the Arecibo and Green Bank dishes lie, in the southern tropics.

So Hofgartner and his colleagues decided to delve into the mystery. They pored over all the available data sets, using Cassini’s observations to “ground-truth” the information gathered by Arecibo and Green Bank.

The researchers tied the reflective patches identified by the radio telescopes to a single “terrain unit,” which has smoother surfaces and a different composition than the surrounding landscape. Such features are characteristic of dry lake or sea beds, Hofgartner said.

Read more at www.space.com

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