Saturn’s orange moon Titan peeks from behind two of Saturn's rings. Epimetheus, another of Saturn’s 62 moons, appears just above the rings.FLICKR, NASA GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTERResearchers studying Saturn’s largest moon have identified billions of tons of vinyl cyanide in the orange haze that hangs above Titan. They suspect that these molecules, which may be able to self-assemble into cell membrane–like structures under the right conditions, rain down on the moon’s poles during the winter. The study was published last week (July 28) in Science Advances.
“Titan has unique and weird chemistry, and all the evidence we have so far suggests there’s a possibility for it to be doing a lot of things we think are necessary for life to exist,” Johns Hopkins University’s Sarah Hörst, who was not involved in the research, tells National Geographic.
“It’s very positive news for putative-Titan-life studies,” Jonathan Lunine, a planetary scientist at Cornell University who also did not participate in the study, tells New Scientist.
NASA’s Maureen Palmer and colleagues discovered the signature of vinyl cyanide in data collected by the ALMA cluster of telescopes in Chile. The molecules are thought to condense and rain on the moon’s surface, primarily in the poles during their alternating winters.
A 2015 computer modeling study published by ...
