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scpg02
Joined: 22 Jul 2007
Posts: 221
Location: Sacramento
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 Posted: Wed Oct 03, 2007 3:15 am Post subject: Titan's icy climate mimics Earth's tropics |
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Contact: Steve Koppes
skoppes@uchicago.edu
773-702-8366
University of Chicago
Titan's icy climate mimics Earth's tropics
| Quote: | If space travelers ever visit Saturn's largest moon, they will find a tropical world where temperatures plunge to minus 274 degrees Fahrenheit, methane rains from the sky and dunes of ice or tar cover the planet's most arid regions. These conditions reflect a cold mirror image of Earth's tropical climate, according to scientists at the University of Chicago.
"You have all these things that are analogous to Earth. At the same time, it's foreign and unfamiliar," said Ray Pierrehumbert, the Louis Block Professor in Geophysical Sciences at Chicago.
Titan, one of Saturn's 60 moons, is the only moon in the solar system large enough to support an atmosphere. Pierrehumbert and Jonathan Mitchell, who recently completed his Ph.D. in Astronomy & Astrophysics at Chicago, have been comparing observations of Titan collected by the Cassini space probe and the Hubble Space Telescope with their own computer simulations of the moon's atmosphere.
Their study of the dynamics behind Titan's methane clouds have appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Their continuing research on Titan's climate focuses on the moon's deserts. |
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-10/uoc-tic100207.php
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