Titan’s oddly thick atmosphere may come from cooked organic compounds
Saturn’s moon is one of the best places to look for life in the solar system
Titan may have a home-baked atmosphere.
Saturn’s largest moon gets some of its thick atmosphere by cooking organic molecules in a warm core, a new study suggests.
The decay of radioactive elements may warm Titan’s core from within, splitting nitrogen and carbon off from complex organic molecules. Once free, those elements can recombine into nitrogen and methane molecules and escape into the atmosphere. That process may account for about half the nitrogen and all the methane observed in Titan’s atmosphere, cosmochemist Kelly Miller and her colleagues report January 22 in the Astrophysical Journal.