Shoreline for Titan?
By Ron Cowen
New radar images of Saturn’s smog-shrouded moon Titan show signs of a shoreline cutting across the moon’s southern hemisphere. Such a shoreline might have been sculpted by liquid methane. Researchers have long speculated that methane, abundant in Titan’s thick atmosphere and recently found in frozen form on its surface, rains down on the moon. Titan is too cold for water to be present as a liquid.
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High prevalence of liquid methane would support the notion that Titan is a chemical cousin of the early Earth, and contains a hydrocarbon brew much like the one from which life emerged on our planet.