Saturn’s ocean moon Titan may not be able to support life, despite the water volume being 12 times of all of Earth’s oceans.
Titan’s underground ocean and other icy moons dotted around our solar system may be barren and lack the organic chemistry for life to form, new astrobiological research suggests.
Titan is Saturn’s largest moon, and the second-biggest in our solar system, it’s famous for its mist of petrochemicals and possessing organic molecules which contain carbon on its surface. However, despite all these good factors, it’s incredibly cold, with surface temperatures not reaching higher than -290 Fahrenheit. In these icy conditions, any type of step in supporting life would progress slowly.
However, deep underground, a liquid ocean that is 12 times that of Earth’s combined is believed to exist. But it doesn’t mean life will persist, says Catherine Neish of Western University in Ontario, Canada.
Neish led an international team looking into whether Titan’s ocean and other icy moons could inhabit life.
They found for the ocean to be habitable, a large amount of organic molecules from the surface would need to reach the ocean to produce and feed life, and this would only happen through comet impacts which would melt surface ice. Liquid water is denser than ice and sinks, so an impact would allow the pool of liquid water to reach down to the underground ocean.
However, Neish, a planetary scientist, found the rate of impact is not high enough for the organic material to sink.
“We assumed that the majority of melt deposits — 65% — would sink all the way to the ocean,” Neish told Space.com.
“Recent modeling work suggests that this is very likely an overestimate, but even in this most optimistic scenario, there is not enough organics moving into Titan’s ocean to support life there.”
Neish is also a co-investigator on NASA’s Dragonfly mission on Titan. The mission is to send a helicopter to the moon in 2028, for it to arrive in 2034. It will explore Titan from the air and touch down to take samples for analysis.
