First, a little about Titan. Titan is @#%^ing huge for a moon. It's the 2nd largest moon in our solar system & is larger than both Mercury & Pluto. It also has a couple unique features for a moon; It has quite a thick atmosphere (No other moons in the solar system have an atmosphere made up of anything other than trace gasses) & has liquid on it's surface (no other planetary objects in our solar system have been found to contain liquids besides earth). This liquid is not water though, as H20 would be frozen solid at the distance Titan is from the sun (it could thaw from geothermal activity, and/or exist underground though) but is liquid methane.
The newest "discovery" is as follows: 5 years ago it was hypothesized that if methane-based life did exist on Titan, (rather than water-based) it might be detectable through a surface depletion of hydrogen & other gasses. New observations show that this is the case; there are lower amounts of these substances than the chemistry of Titan would indicate. Basically, the Hydrogen in the atmosphere is disappearing when it gets to the surface. Ipso facto, it could possibly be being consumed by Titanian life forms.
Now, the guy who hypothesized the surface depletion of Hydrogen and other gases also wrote a little tidbit & he had this to say about this recent observation.
Quote:
There are four possibilities for the recently reported findings, listed in order of their likely reality:
1. The determination that there is a strong flux of hydrogen into the surface is mistaken. It will be interesting to see if other researchers, in trying to duplicate Strobel's results, reach the same conclusion.
2. There is a physical process that is transporting H2 from the upper atmosphere into the lower atmosphere. One possibility is adsorption onto the solid organic atmospheric haze particles which eventually fall to the ground. However this would be a flux of H2, and not a net loss of H2.
3. If the loss of hydrogen at the surface is correct, the non-biological explanation requires that there be some sort of surface catalyst, presently unknown, that can mediate the hydrogenation reaction at 95 K, the temperature of the Titan surface. That would be quite interesting and a startling find although not as startling as the presence of life.
4. The depletion of hydrogen, acetylene, and ethane, is due to a new type of liquid-methane based life form as predicted (Benner et al. 2004, McKay and Smith 2005, and Schulze-Makuch and Grinspoon 2005).
1. The determination that there is a strong flux of hydrogen into the surface is mistaken. It will be interesting to see if other researchers, in trying to duplicate Strobel's results, reach the same conclusion.
2. There is a physical process that is transporting H2 from the upper atmosphere into the lower atmosphere. One possibility is adsorption onto the solid organic atmospheric haze particles which eventually fall to the ground. However this would be a flux of H2, and not a net loss of H2.
3. If the loss of hydrogen at the surface is correct, the non-biological explanation requires that there be some sort of surface catalyst, presently unknown, that can mediate the hydrogenation reaction at 95 K, the temperature of the Titan surface. That would be quite interesting and a startling find although not as startling as the presence of life.
4. The depletion of hydrogen, acetylene, and ethane, is due to a new type of liquid-methane based life form as predicted (Benner et al. 2004, McKay and Smith 2005, and Schulze-Makuch and Grinspoon 2005).
Neat stuff, but not as neat as the Telegraph made it out to be.
Edited, Jun 8th 2010 5:47am by Omegavegeta
