geologists of the M.I.T. they made a discovery: wave activity on the largest moon Saturn, Titanmay be strong enough to erode the coastlines of its lakes and seas.
Until now, the scientists they had found him scientific discovery of indirect and contradictory signals of wave activity, based on remote images of the surface of Titan.
Titanthe largest moon in Saturnis the only planetary body in the Solar systemin addition to ours, which currently houses rivers, lakes and seas assets. It is believed that the river systems of Titanwhich seem from another world, are filled with liquid methane and ethane that flow into wide lakes and seassome as large as the Great Lakes of the Land.
The existence of the great seas and lakes smaller than Titan was confirmed in 2007, with images taken by the Cassini spacecraft of the POT. Since then, the scientific research They have studied those and other images for clues about the moon’s mysterious liquid environment.
Coastal erosion
For the new study, the MIT team took a different approach to investigating the presence of waves on Titan, first modeling the ways a lake can erode on Earth. They then applied their modeling to Titan’s seas to determine what form of erosion might have produced the coastlines in the Cassini images. They found that waves were the most likely explanation.
The researchers emphasize that their results are not definitive; Confirming that there are waves on Titan will require direct observations of wave activity on the moon’s surface.
“We can say, based on our results, that if the coastlines of the seas of Titan have eroded, waves are the most likely culprit,” Taylor Perron, professor of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT, says in a statement.
“If we could stand on the edge of one of the seas of Titanwe could see waves of liquid methane and ethane hitting the shore and crashing into the coasts during the storms. And they would be able to erode the material that the coast is made of.”
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