NASA's Cassini spacecraft has discovered a strange cloud on Titan that goes against everything scientists thought they knew about the moon's atmosphere.

Titan is a cold place. This moon of Saturn is far enough from the Sun that temperatures are around 300 degrees Fahrenheit colder than on Earth. In this environment, liquid water can't exist. Instead, hydrocarbons like methane can condense and freeze, forming a cycle complete with clouds, rain, and surface oceans of liquid methane. It is the only place in the solar system besides Earth where these exist.

NASA's Cassini probe was sent to observe Saturn and its moons, and besides taking incredible images, it spends a great deal of time studying Titan's atmosphere. Recently, it spotted the oddball cloud. It exists in Titan's stratosphere. It's made of a chemical called dicyanoacetylene, or C4N2. The problem is, Titan's stratosphere has almost no C4N2, so scientists aren't sure where all the stuff in the cloud came from.

A possible answer is found in the Earth's own stratosphere. High above Earth's poles, water combines with pollutants like CFCs in thin, wispy clouds. The chemical reaction releases chlorine, which is present in these clouds in high concentrations despite being almost completely absent in the surrounding atmosphere.

A similar process might occur on Titan. Chemicals already present in Titan's upper atmosphere could combine inside clouds, creating excess amounts of C4N2. The fact that Earth and Titan have similar processes in their upper atmosphere means that there might be other weather patterns the two have in common. Studying Titan's clouds could, in the future, provide answers to weather mysteries here on Earth.

Source: NASA

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