What's New and What's Cool?!?

I've been away for a bit. Busy doing writing of a different sort. But I've tried to keep up on things.

So, what have I seen that I thought was interesting?

I watched a Nova episode from 2006 on PBS last night on the exploration of Saturn and its moon Titan by Cassini and the Huygens space probes. Fascinating stuff. Titan is one of only 4 known bodies in our solar system that is rocky and has an atmosphere. The other three being Earth, Venus, and Mars. Venus is way too hot to have any organic molecules present (lead will melt on its surface), and Mars is far too dry. Titan is incredibly cold, but interesting in that it might give insights on what it was like on a very primitive Earth.

Pictures taken by the Huygens probe on Titan showed an alien yet somehow familiar surface. Structures looked like mountains, lake beds, and even volcanoes. However, the rivers are made of liquid methane. It's so cold there that what is gaseous methane on Earth is liquid there. And the volcanoes are actually cryo-volcanoes. When they erupt, they don't erupt lava, but they erupt a mixture of supercooled water mixed with ammonia. The temperature of this is about -100 degrees Celsius!

Methane is an organic molecule made up of carbon and hydrogen. Ammonia is made up of nitrogen and hydrogen. And water is present. These could potentially be building blocks of amino acids (chemicals that make up proteins). It's so darn cold there though, that any chemical activity takes a long time to happen.

So, who knows. Maybe deep down under Titan's surface where it's a bit warmer there are actually microbes down there. Here on Earth we have bacteria that release methane as a byproduct of their metabolism. Could something similar be going on there, deep under the surface of Titan? Could interstellar methanogens be present on one of Saturn's moons? Could those methanogens be responsible for a good portion of the methane on Titan? I'll probably never know in my lifetime, but it's fun to contemplate.

Back when I was in graduate school, taking my general exam, we were asked to think about this question. If there were life on another planet, it would probably be microbial. So for our test question we had to design a microbial ecosystem for this hypothetical planet. It's kind of fun to look at pictures of Titan taken by the Huygens probe, and think that my general exam might actually be playing out in real time somewhere out there.