Sunday, April 15, 2012

Titan: The Moon of Saturn


        Titan is one of the most interesting space entities in our solar system. What makes this awesome named thing so awesome? Well its the fact of its thick orange atmosphere that first aroused interest. Whenever scientist see things and not what its made up of, it seems to annoy us. So what did we do? We sent a probe, which shot off of another satellite who was gathering information around the area with a special interest in Titan. 

        Titan has an atmosphere however it is not a planet. It orbits Saturn and offers the possibilities of life in the future? How do we know this. Well we don’t but the probability is more than any other place besides earth in this solar system. That probe gathered information on what titan held beneath its atmosphere. We found that it had oceans of methane and it rained. We also know that the conditions on the planet are far to hostile to life as we know it. This doesn’t mean much as we have recently been broadening our views on how life works.

        Another experiment was done to see if using the compounds and elements on the planet could form life in its setting and the results proved true. The compounds that formed life on this planet began to form. That is exciting news. Maybe life in the universe isn’t as rare as we thought. To think there are so many suns all with a life zone and planet surrounding them, and we have came close to finding the same things that started life here, right beside us. Everything so far we’ve noticed has been a random scattering of different things. If we find it so close, the chances of it being many places exist.


Titan's Discovery:

when: It was discovered on March 25th, 1655
who: A Dutch astronomer by the name of Christiaan Huygens. (the probe was named after him)

The name Titan comes from a legend that tells the story of Zeus's sons who were killed by the titans. Zeus was angry and struck them down. The lighting burned them to ashes and man was created from these ashes.

Can we live there?
Unfortunately we can't. The moon of Saturn is far to cold for humans. It lies outside of the life zone . It also is known to have far more smog gases and can rain down gas like substances.

Stats:
equatorial radius: 2575 km or 1600 miles
It is the biggest of the 53 known moons orbiting Saturn. (even bigger than our own)
The surface of Titan is about -289 degrees Fahrenheit pr -178 degrees Celsius
Titans orbit around Saturn last around 16 days and is 1.2 million kilometers long

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