A new discovery on Titan’s haze is revealing new information about burning fuels on Earth.
Florida International University chemist Alexander Mebel and a team of international researchers have been studying Saturn’s largest moon, trying to unlock a mystery brewing beneath Titan’s thick, hazy atmosphere—How is it that dunes of hydrocarbons exist on the moon’s frozen surface?
On Earth, the kinds of hydrocarbons that cause soot are only known to occur during the combustion process under very high temperatures. They are the kinds of byproducts that engineers usually try to eliminate when engines burn fuel.
By examining data from NASA’s Cassini-Huygens probe, the researchers determined hydrocarbons can form the type of complex chains that create Titan’s orange-brown haze layers at temperatures as low as 90 degrees Kelvin, which is about -298 degrees Fahrenheit—that’s nearly 330 degrees below freezing on Earth.
