A team including Berkeley Lab scientists homes in on a ‘missing link’ in Titan’s one-of-a-kind chemistry.
Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is unique among all moons in our solar system for its dense and nitrogen-rich atmosphere that also contains hydrocarbons and other compounds, and the story behind the formation of this rich chemical mix has been the source of some scientific debate.
Now, a research collaboration involving scientists in the Chemical Sciences Division at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has zeroed in on a low-temperature chemical mechanism that may have driven the formation of multiple-ringed molecules – the precursors to more complex chemistry now found in the moon’s brown-orange haze layer.
The study, co-led by Ralf Kaiser at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and published in the Oct. 8 edition of the journal Nature Astronomy, runs counter to theories that high-temperature reaction mechanisms are required to produce the chemical makeup that satellite missions have observed in Titan’s atmosphere.
>Read more on the Advanced Light Source/Berkeley Lab website
Image: The atmospheric haze of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon (pictured here along Saturn’s midsection), is captured in this natural-color image (box at left). A study that involved experiments at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source has provided new clues about the chemical steps that may have produced this haze.
Credits: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Space Science Institute, Caltech