NEW PLUTO PICTURES SHOW JELLY-BEAN MOON AND MOUNTAINS

Newly-discovered frozen peaks on Pluto are taller than Ben Nevis while images of Nix reveal an unusual red spot

Newly-discovered frozen peaks on Pluto are taller than Ben Nevis while images of Nix reveal an unusual red spot

The latest pictures to be beamed back from the far reaches of the Solar System show a new mountain range on Pluto and the first close up images of two of the dwarf-planet’s smaller moons.

NASA’s New Horizons probe has discovered a new, mountain range on bright, heart-shaped region named Tombaugh Region.

These newly-discovered frozen peaks are estimated to be around 5,000ft high – about 600ft taller than Ben Nevis.

The Norgay Mountains discovered by New Horizons on July 15 are much taller, around 11,000ft, roughly the height of The Pyrenees.

The new range is just west of the region within Pluto’s heart called Sputnik Plain and some 68 miles northwest of Norgay Mountains..

New Horizons has also picked up the first images large images of two of Pluto’s smaller moons.
Nix and Hydra – the second and third moons to be discovered – are approximately the same size, but their similarity ends there.

New Horizons’ first colour image of Nix shows a jelly bean shaped satellite which is 26 miles long and 22 miles wide.

Although the overall surface colour of Nix is neutral grey in the image, the newfound region has a distinct red tint. Hints of a bull’s-eye pattern lead scientists to speculate that the reddish region is a crater.

Meanwhile, the sharpest image yet received from New Horizons of Pluto’s satellite Hydra shows that its irregular shape resembles the state of Michigan.

There appear to be at least two large craters, one of which is mostly in shadow. The upper portion looks darker than the rest of Hydra, suggesting a possible difference in surface composition.

Source: Telegraph

NEW NASA CAMERA PROVIDES AN ‘EPIC’ VIEW OF EARTH

This is what Earth looks like from a million miles away.

The stunning image, which focuses on America, was taken by the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) and is the satellite’s first view of the entire sunlit side of our planet.

It was presented to the White House today, prompting a tweet from President Barack Obama describing it as: ‘A beautiful reminder that we need to protect the only planet we have.’

The blue marble was captured by the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (Epic) and created by combining three separate images to show the Earth in incredible detail.

The camera takes a series of 10 images using different narrowband filters – from ultraviolet to near infrared.

‘This first DSCOVR image of our planet demonstrates the unique and important benefits of Earth observation from space,’ said Nasa Administrator Charlie Bolden.

DSCOVR orbits the sun at a location called the Lagrange point 1, or L1, It’s from that unique vantage point that the Epic instrument is acquiring science quality images of the entire sunlit face of Earth. Data from Epic will be used to measure ozone and aerosol levels in Earth’s atmosphere, cloud height, vegetation properties and the ultraviolet reflectivity of Earth

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3168520/America-like-ve-never-seen-New-Nasa-camera-provides-EPIC-view-Earth-million-miles-away.html#ixzz3gcucsg7K
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See it! Moon, Venus, Jupiter, comet

Source: Earth Sky

What a glorious western twilight sky on the nights of July 17 and 18, 2015! Waxing moon, brightest planets, and Comet C/2014 Q1 (PANSTARRS).

Venus (top left), Jupiter and the moon made a triangle as seen from some parts of the world on July 18, 2015. Aimilianos Gkekas submitted this photo to EarthSky. He caught the trio from a monastery known as Meteora – literally ‘suspended in the sky’ – in Thessaly, Greece.

Moon, Venus, Jupiter and Comet C/2014 Q1 (PANSTARRS) on July 18 by John Lafferty. 

 Venus, Jupiter and the moon setting on July 18 as seen from Porto, Portual. The star above the planets is Regulus in the constellation Leo. Photo submitted by João Pedro Bessa.

Moon and Venus on July 18, 2015 by John Ashley in Kila, Montana. If you view larger, you can see both worlds are crescents as seen from Earth now. Read why Venus appears as a crescent now.

Moon and Venus on July 18, 2015 by Billie C. Barb at Mutiny Bay, Freeland, Washington. 

Another view of the moon and crescent Venus on July 18, this one in daylight, from Spencer Mann in Davis, California.

STUNNING FIRST HI-DEFINITION IMAGE OF PLUTO REVEALS HUGE MOUNTAINS

The first ever high-resolution image of Pluto has been beamed back to Earth showing water ice and 11,000ft (3,350 metre) mountains. The mountains likely formed no more than 100 million years ago – mere youngsters relative to the 4.56-billion-year age of the solar system. Nasa says they may still be in the process of building

Like the rest of Pluto, this region would presumably have been pummeled by space debris for billions of years and would have once been heavily cratered – unless recent activity had given the region a facelift, erasing those pockmarks.

‘We now have an isolated small planet that is showing activity after 4.5 billion years,’ said Alan Stern, New Horizons’ principal investigator. ‘It’s going to send a lot of geophysicists back to the drawing board.’

‘This is one of the youngest surfaces we’ve ever seen in the solar system,’ added Jeff Moore of New Horizons’ Geology, Geophysics and Imaging Team (GGI).

This is the first time astronomers have seen a world that is mostly composed of ice that is not orbiting a planet.

Unlike the icy moons of giant planets, Pluto cannot be heated by the gravitational pull of a larger planetary body. Nasa says some other process must be generating the mountainous landscape.

‘This may cause us to rethink what powers geological activity on many other icy worlds,’ says GGI deputy team leader John Spencer of the Southwest Research Institute.

In a Wednesday press conference, scientists also revealed a high-resolution photo of Pluto’s moon Charon, which is covered in cliffs and ridges:

They also released the first-ever photo of Pluto’s tiny moon Hydra, which appears to be covered in water ice:

A new sneak-peak image of Hydra  is the first to reveal its apparent irregular shape and its size, estimated to be about 27 by 20 miles (43 by 33km). The surface shows differences in brightness, which suggests that Hydra’s outer layer is composed manly of water ice .

Read more: Daily Mail

THE NEW HORIZONS PLUTO MISSION IS A BIG DEAL. HERE ARE SOME REASONS WHY

SOURCE : vox.com 

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is about to show us an alien world for the first time. At precisely 7:49 am ET on Tuesday, the probe will become the first spacecraft to fly by Pluto.

New Horizons has been en route for nine years, traveling more than 3 billion miles. The flyby will be over in a matter of minutes, as the probe frantically takes hundreds of photos and collects data on Pluto’s atmosphere, geology, and moons. All this data will be enormously valuable to scientists as they seek to understand our solar system and how it formed billions of years ago.

More than anything, this mission is about broadening our horizons — taking in just a little bit more of the impossibly vast universe we live in.

1) We’ve never seen Pluto before

Pluto feels familiar. It’s easy to imagine the small, frigid rock, millions of miles from the sun and covered in ice.

But what you’re picturing in your head when you think about Pluto is probably an artist’s illustration. Until very recently, we didn’t even know exactly what color it was — and the best photos we had of Pluto looked like this:

New Horizons is going to change that in a very big way. Already, as it’s closed in on Pluto, it’s given us way better photos than ever before:

Pluto (right) and its moon Charon, as seen by New Horizons on July 11. (NASA-JHUAPL-SWRI)

The high-resolution photos to come will give us detailed topographical maps, just like those provided by the satellites that orbit Earth. They could reveal mountains, ice caps, volcanoes, or even an ocean of liquid water under the ice. “Who knows what kind of bizarre things we’ll find up close?” Stern said.

2) This mission will remind you how vast space really is

Earth, as seen by the Voyager spacecraft, from more than 4 billion miles away.

We spend our entire lives on the surface of Earth — so it’s hard to really grasp how far away Pluto truly is from us.

But as an analogy, think of Earth as a basketball. By comparison, Pluto would be a little larger than a golf ball. But if you wanted to keep the scale constant, you’d have to put that golf ball incredibly far away: 50 to 80 miles (depending on its location in orbit). This mission, like many activities in space, is a good reminder of how vast our corner of the universe is — and how absurdly tiny our entire earthly realm of experience is by comparison.

And it’s not just the size of space that boggles the mind. It’s also the timescale on which everything occurs. Pluto takes 248 Earth years to orbit the sun. To put it another way, the entirety of US history has occurred during a single Plutonian orbit.

3) We won’t get many more missions like this for a while

There’s a mission to Europa planned, but it won’t reach the moon for a decade or more.

The past few decades have been filled with all sorts of fascinating missions to the planets, moons, asteroids, and comets of our solar system — uncrewed probes sent every few years, run by trained scientists, and supported by government funding.

But the sad truth is that this era is largely drawing to a close. As David W. Brown writes in an article on the dark future of American space exploration, “There is nothing budgeted in the pipeline to take its place. Yesterday invested in today. But we are not investing in tomorrow.”

This is the result of cutbacks to NASA’s planetary exploration budget. The OSIRIS-REx probe will launch next year, to travel to an asteroid and bring back a sample, but it won’t return until 2023. Meanwhile, a mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa is in the works, but it likely won’t be launched until 2025 at the earliest, and wouldn’t reach Europa until the 2030s.

In other words: Enjoy this brief flyby. It’s going to be a while before any NASA probe visits a new world.

4)This is a staggering technological achievement

t’s hard to appreciate just how difficult it is to send a spacecraft to Pluto. But think of it this way: because it’s so incredibly far away, it took New Horizons nine years to cover the 3-billion-mile trip there — which means the craft is using decade-old technology, traveling a route that was calculated years ago.

New Horizons’ trajectory through the solar system.

Despite this, NASA engineers managed to get the tiny probe — about the size and shape of a grand piano — to an incredibly precise spot in space, using Jupiter’s gravity as a slingshot to accelerate it outward and a few thruster burns over the years to keep the probe on track.

Along the way, they had to worry about potentially damaging debris nearby Pluto — as well as a scary software glitch this past weekend, which was, thankfully, resolved. Now New Horizons is going to fly within 7,750 miles of Pluto, coming closer than its moons.

Because New Horizons is traveling at such a high speed (about 31,000 miles per hour) and can’t slow down, the flyby will be over in a matter of minutes — fording it to collect all its data in a tiny window of time.

And receiving all that data is another huge challenge. Because New Horizons is so far away, it takes about 4.5 hours for any data it sends back to reach Earth. And the signal is so faint that NASA has to use 200-foot-wide radio dishes (one each in Australia, California, and Spain) to pick it up. This means an extremely low rate of data transmission: about 1 kilobit per second, more than 50 times slower than a 56k modem from the ’90s. It takes more than 42 minutes for New Horizons to fully transmit an image that’s 1024 pixels wide.

If you haven’t been paying attention so far, now’s the time to start. This is a really big deal.

Huge Saltwater Ocean Found on Jupiter Moon Ganymede

Artistic Impression of Ganymede (Largest Moon in the Solar System)

NASA has confirmed that Ganymede, one of the moons orbiting Jupiter, has a saltwater ocean lying below its icy exterior, making it a viable location for life to flourish.

The scientists studying the planet and its outlier moons through the Hubble Telescope shared the news in a statement Thursday, saying that the ocean may bear more liquid than all the water on Earth combined.

Ganymede is an anomaly among moons. It is the largest known moon in our solar system, and the only one that generates its own magnetic field. This attribute produces a phenomenon called aurorae—strips of radiant electrified gas that circle Ganymede’s poles. Because Ganymede is situated so close to its mother planet, any changes to Jupiter’s magnetic field directly affect that of its moon. So when Jupiter’s magnetic field shifts due to the planet’s rotation, Ganymede’s aurorae “rock” back and forth in a sort of cosmic mating dance.

Observing the interplay between the planet and its moon, scientists surmised that an ocean works against Jupiter’s magnetic pull, causing Ganymede to rock less violently than they had anticipated. Once they had observed the planet with the Hubble Telescope, the researchers built computer models that supported speculation that Ganymede has a salty ocean.

Researchers believe the subterranean ocean is 10 times as deep as Earth’s oceans.

Since water is necessary to sustain life, it’s possible that these oceans may confirm the long-suspected presence of life on other planets, or on moons such as Titan and Enceladus.

NASA has speculated since the 1970s that there was water on Ganymede. A 2002 Galileo mission confirmed that the moon had its own magnetic field, but the findings weren’t concrete enough to corroborate suspicion that Ganymede had a vast ocean beneath its outer crust—until now. In a statement, an assistant administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, John Grunseld, said, “A deep ocean under the icy crust of Ganymede opens up further exciting possibilities for life beyond Earth.”

Source:Newsweek.com

NASA spacecraft sends historic Pluto images

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has sent its first stunning images of Pluto as the probe closes in on the dwarf planet.

New Horizons was more than 203 million km away from Pluto when it began taking images, the US space agancy said in a statement.

Although still just a dot along with its largest moon, Charon, the images come on the 109th birthday of Clyde Tombaugh who discovered the distant icy world in 1930.

“My dad would be thrilled with New Horizons,” said Clyde Tombaugh’s daughter Annette Tombaugh, of Las Cruces, New Mexico.

“To actually see the planet that he had discovered, and find out more about it — to get to see the moons of Pluto — he would have been astounded. I am sure it would have meant so much to him if he were still alive today,” she added.

The new images, taken with New Horizons’ telescopic Long—Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), are the first acquired during the spacecraft’s 2015 approach to the Pluto system which culminates with a close flyby of Pluto and its moons July 14.

Over the next few months, LORRI will take hundreds of pictures of Pluto, against a starry backdrop, to refine the team’s estimates of New Horizons’ distance to Pluto.

As in these first images, the Pluto system will resemble little more than bright dots in the camera’s view until late spring.

“Pluto is finally becoming more than just a pinpoint of light,” said Hal Weaver, New Horizons project scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.

“The dwarf planet will continue to grow larger and larger in the images as New Horizons spacecraft hurtles toward its targets. The new LORRI images also demonstrate that the camera’s performance is unchanged since it was launched more than nine years ago,” Weaver said.

Source: thehindu

Scientists Discover Exoplanet With Rings Far More Impressive Than Our Saturn

Artist’s conception of the extrasolar ring system circling the young giant planet or brown dwarf J1407b is shown. Credit: Ron Miller

Children and adults alike marvel at the rings around Saturn. In a model of our solar system, Saturn—and its rings—is typically the one that gets the most attention.

But while it is easy to be fascinated by Saturn, astronomers have recently found an exoplanet with an even grander expanse of wings that is sure to wow a new generation of stargazers.

“The star is much too far away to observe the rings directly, but we could make a detailed mode based on the rapid brightness variations in the star light passing through the ring system. If we could replace Saturn’s rings with the rings around J1407b, they would be easily visible at night and be many times larger than the full moon,” explains lead researcher Matthew Kenworthy. “The details that we see in the light curve are incredible. The eclipse lasted for several weeks, but you see rapid changes on time scales of tens of minutes as a result of fine structures in the rings.”

Study co-author Eric Mamaek, who first found the rings of the planet, comments, “The planetary science community has theorized for decades that planets like Jupiter and Saturn would have had, at an early stage, disks around them that then led to the formation of satellites. However, until we discovered this object in 2012, no-one had seen such a ring system. This is the first snapshot of satellite formation on million-kilometer scales around a substellar object.”

The University of Rochester professor of physics and astronomy goes on to say, “This planet is much larger than Jupiter or Saturn, and its ring system is roughly 200 times larger than Saturn’s rings are today. You could think of it as a kind of super Saturn.”

Source : piercepioneer.com

Researchers: Solar system may have Planet X , Planet Y

The presence of two additional planets might explain the unexpected orbital features of some trans-Neptunian objects.

Scientists have postulated the existence of possibly two undiscovered planets beyond the orbit of Neptune to explain discrepancies in the orbits of extreme trans-Neptunian objects (ETNO). The objects have orbits that take them beyond the orbit of the planet Neptune.

Theory predicts that they be randomly distributed and that their orbits must have a semi-major axis with a value around 150 AU; an orbital inclination of nearly zero degrees; and an angle of perihelion, the point in the object’s orbit at which it is closest to the Sun, of zero to 180 degrees.

However, a dozen ETNO do not fit these orbital criteria. These objects have semi-major axis values of 150 to 525 AU, orbital inclinations of around 20 degrees, and angles of perihelion far from 180 degrees.

According to a statement, a new study by astrophysicists at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) and University of Cambridge have calculated that these orbital discrepancies could be explained by the existence of at least two additional planets beyond the orbits of Neptune and dwarf planet Pluto. Their study suggests that the gravitational pulls of those two planets must be disturbing the orbits of some smaller ETNO.

However, there are two difficulties with the hypothesis. One is that current models of the formation of our solar system do not allow for additional planets beyond Neptune. Secondly, the team’s sample size is very small, only 13 objects. However, additional results are in the pipeline, which will expand the sample.

“This excess of objects with unexpected orbital parameters makes us believe that some invisible forces are altering the distribution of the orbital elements of the ETNO and we consider that the most probable explanation is that other unknown planets exist beyond Neptune and Pluto,” said Carlos de la Fuente Marcos of UCM and lead author on the study.

The new findings have been published in two papers published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters.

Source : thespacereporter

10 Wonders Of The Universe

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What's the biggest thing in the universe? Find out here, along with 9 other incredible astronomical wonders.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUbQnHvXYEI

A Universe of Blue Dots? --"Water Common During the Formation of All Planetary Systems"

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The new SciFi blockbuster, Interstellar, shows astonauts from post apocalyptic earth, destroyed by what appears to be a modern dust-bowl, catapulted into the unknown of outer space in the hopes of finding a new home for the human race, only to discover an extraterrestrial tidal wave on a distant exo planet. How realistic is the premise of an alien water planet? New findings suggest it's based on solid science.
"This is an important step forward in our quest to find out if life exists on other planets," said Tim Harries, from the University of Exeter's Physics and Astronomy department, who was part of the research team. "We know that water is vital for the evolution of life on Earth, but it was possible that the Earth's water originated in the specific conditions of the early solar system, and that those circumstances might occur infrequently elsewhere. By identifying the ancient heritage of Earth's water, we can see that the way in which our solar system was formed will not be unique, and that exoplanets will form in environments with abundant water. Consequently, it raises the possibility that some exoplanets could house the right conditions, and water resources, for life to evolve."
The implication of these findings is that some of the solar system's water must have been inherited from the Sun's birth environment, and thus predate the Sun itself. If our solar system's formation was typical, this implies that water is a common ingredient during the formation of all planetary systems.

To date, the Kepler satellite has detected nearly 1,000 confirmed extrasolar planets. The widespread availability of water during the planet-formation process puts a promising outlook on the prevalence of life throughout the galaxy.

A pioneering new study has shown that water found on Earth predates the formation of the Sun – raising hopes that life could exist on exoplanets, the planets orbiting other stars in our galaxy. The ground-breaking research set out to discover the origin of the water that was deposited on the Earth as it formed.

It found that a significant fraction of water found on Earth, and across our solar system, predates the formation of the Sun. By showing that water is 'inherited' from the environment when a star is born, the international team of scientists believe other exoplanetary systems also had access to an abundance of water during their own formation.

As water is a key component for the development of life on Earth, the study has important implications for the potential for life elsewhere in the galaxy.

Scientists have previously been able to understand the conditions present when stars are formed by looking at the composition of comets and asteroids, which show which gases, dust and, most importantly, ices were circling the star at its birth.

The team of international scientists were able to use 'heavy water' ices – those with an excess of water made with the element deuterium rather than hydrogen – to determine whether the water ices formed before, or during, the solar system's formation.

"Unexpected Planet" Discovered by Yale Astronomers

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Astronomers have discovered a new planet that has a highly inconsistent orbit time around its Sun.

The low-mass, low-density planet, known only as PH3c, which is 2,300 light years away from the Earth, has an atmosphere loaded with hydrogen and helium.

The planet nearly escaped detection as PH3c does not have a consistent orbit time around its Sun due to the gravitational influence of other planets on its system.

“On the Earth, these effects are very small, only on the scale of one second or so,” said Joseph Schmitt, a graduate student at Yale University.

“PH3c’s orbital period changed by 10.5 hours in just 10 orbits,” explained Schmitt.

This inconsistency kept the planet out of reach for automated computer algorithms that search stellar light curves and identify regular dips caused by objects passing in front of stars, he said.

The researchers discovered the new planet with the help of Planet Hunters programme coordinated by Yale University and University of Oxford.

The programme, which has found over 60 planet candidates since 2010, enlists citizen scientists to check survey data from the Kepler spacecraft.

Not only did Planet Hunters spot PH3c, but the discovery also enabled astronomers to better characterise two other planets - one on each side of PH3c.

An outer planet PH3d is slightly larger and heavier than Saturn. An inner planet, PH3b may have a rocky composition like the Earth.

“Finding the middle planet was key to confirming the others and allowing us to find their masses,” Schmitt explained.

Planet-forming lifeline discovered in a binary star system

Artist’s impression of the double-star system GG Tauri-A.

If the feeding process into the system’s inner disk occurs elsewhere, the findings introduce many new potential locations to find exoplanets.

For the first time, researchers using ALMA have detected a streamer of gas flowing from a massive outer disk toward the inner reaches of a binary star system. This never-before-seen feature may be responsible for sustaining a second, smaller disk of planet-forming material that otherwise would have disappeared long ago. Half of Sun-like stars are born in binary systems, meaning that these findings will have major consequences for the hunt for exoplanets.

A research group led by Anne Dutrey from the Laboratory of Astrophysics of Bordeaux, France, used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to observe the distribution of dust and gas in a multiple-star system called GG Tau-A. This object is only a few million years old and lies about 450 light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus the Bull.

Like a wheel in a wheel, GG Tau-A contains a large, outer disk encircling the entire system as well as an inner disk around the main central star. This second inner disk has a mass roughly equivalent to that of Jupiter. Its presence has been an intriguing mystery for astronomers since it is losing material to its central star at a rate that should have depleted it long ago.

While observing these structures with ALMA, the team made the exciting discovery of gas clumps in the region between the two disks. The new observations suggest that material is being transferred from the outer to the inner disk, creating a sustaining lifeline between the two.

“Material flowing through the cavity was predicted by computer simulations but has not been imaged before. Detecting these clumps indicates that material is moving between the disks, allowing one to feed off the other,” said Dutrey. “These observations demonstrate that material from the outer disk can sustain the inner disk for a long time. This has major consequences for potential planet formation.”

Planets are born from the material left over from star birth. This is a slow process, meaning that an enduring disk is a prerequisite for planet formation. If the feeding process into the inner disk now seen with ALMA occurs in other multiple-star systems, the findings introduce a vast number of new potential locations to find exoplanets in the future.

The first phase of exoplanet searches was directed at single-host stars like the Sun. More recently, it has been shown that a large fraction of giant planets orbit binary-star systems. Now, researchers have begun to take an even closer look and investigate the possibility of planets orbiting the individual stars of multiple-star systems. The new discovery supports the possible existence of such planets, giving exoplanet discoverers new happy hunting grounds.

“Almost half the Sun-like stars were born in binary systems,” said Emmanuel Di Folco from the Laboratory of Astrophysics of Bordeaux, France. “This means that we have found a mechanism to sustain planet formation that applies to a significant number of stars in the Milky Way. Our observations are a big step forward in truly understanding planet formation.”ast

Jupiter's ‘one-eyed giant Cyclops’ captured by Hubble

A stunning event captured by NASA’s Hubble Telescope shows a big black eye staring back from Jupiter's Great Red Spot storm. In reality, it is shadow play on a planetary scale.

The image was captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope as it tracked changes in Jupiter’s immense Great Red Spot storm – a storm that has been raging for over 300 years. The black eye is caused by the shadow of the Jovian moon, Ganymede, sweeping across the center of the storm.

“For a moment, Jupiter stared back at Hubble like a one-eyed giant Cyclops,” a NASA spokesman told the Daily Express.

The Great Red Spot, the largest known vortex in the Solar System at 10,000 miles wide, is a persistent anti-cyclonic storm just south of Jupiter's equator. It has been raging for between 300 and 400 years, blowing winds at 345 miles an hour – speeds that are beyond comparison with even an Earthly Category 5 hurricane, which can only maximize up to 200 miles.

Astronomers are only beginning to fully understand the complexity of Jupiter, a gas giant which has a mass 317 times bigger than Earth. The planet has 62 moons – including four large ones called the Galilean moons, first discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1610. Ganymede is the largest of these moons.

High-Altitude Methane Ice Cloud Discovered Floating Above Titan's Pole

NASA scientists have uncovered a starting new find on Saturn's moon, Titan. They've found an unexpected high-altitude methane ice cloud, similar to exotic clouds formed high above Earth's own poles. This cloud in the stratosphere over Titan’s north pole (left) is similar to Earth’s polar stratospheric clouds (right). NASA scientists found that Titan’s cloud contains methane ice, which was not previously thought to form in that part of the atmosphere. Cassini first spotted the cloud in 2006. (Photo : L. NASA/JPL/U. of Ariz./LPGNantes; R. NASA/GSFC/M. Schoeberl)

NASA scientists have uncovered a starting new find on Saturn's moon, Titan. They've found an unexpected high-altitude methane ice cloud, similar to exotic clouds formed high above Earth's own poles.

The researchers first spotted the cloud with the help of NASA's Cassini spacecraft. It was part of the winter cap of condensation over Titan's north pole. Now, scientists have teased apart the data and found that the cloud contained methane ice, which produces a much denser cloud than the previously identified ethane ice.

"The idea that methane clouds could form this high on Titan is completely new," said Carrie Anderson, lead author of the new study, in a news release. "Nobody considered that possible before."

The temperatures in Titan's lower stratosphere are not the same at all latitudes. In fact, the high-altitude temperature near the north pole is far colder than just south of the equator. This temperature difference-as much as 11 degrees Fahrenheit-is enough to yield methane ice.

So how do these clouds form? The mechanisms for forming these high-altitude clouds are different from what happens in the troposphere. Titan has a global circulation pattern; warm air in the summer hemisphere wells up from the surface and enters the stratosphere, slowly making its way to the winter pole. There, the air sinks back down and cools as it descends. This forms the methane clouds.

Currently, the scientists are gathering more information about Saturn's moon in order to better understand the natural processes that occur on the alien world. This could shed light on the processes that occur on exoplanets and allow scientists to apply their findings to processes that also occur on Earth.

"Titan continues to amaze with natural processes similar to those on Earth, yet involving materials different from our familiar water," said Scott Edgington, Cassini deputy project scientist. "As we approach southern winter solstice on Titan, we will further explore how these cloud formation processes might vary with season."