Titan (Titan) is the largest moon of Saturn. Astronomers revealed that Titan likely formed with Saturn billions of years ago. Titan appears to have many Earth-like properties. But it's a very different place. The weather is very cold. On the one hand, rain and oceans are composed of liquid hydrocarbons such as methane, and on the other hand, water freezes until it turns into ice. But on Titan there are sand dunes too.
A vast field of sand dunes covers more than one-eighth of Titan's surface. These sand dunes are approximately 100 meters high, 1-2 kilometers wide at the base, and can extend for hundreds of kilometres. It is thought to have formed naturally on the Moon through erosion or condensation from hydrocarbons in the atmosphere. But a team of astronomers at the University of Colorado, USA, suspects that the sand that forms the dunes is actually the same. It may have come from something extraterrestrial, such as a comet. The team proposed the idea that the sand particles are made of tholin, a red substance found in space. They are found throughout the colder regions of the solar system. Which works to cool the hydrocarbons present in comets or the outer atmospheres of planets and moons when interacting with ultraviolet radiation coming from the sun, the complex tholin compound will be created. Tuline formed in Titan's dry atmosphere. It can be electrostatically coagulated to form small globules of soot. It then falls to the moon's surface, creating dust and sand.
However, a future Titan exploration project using the Dragonfly, an eight-rotor drone that plans to reach Titan's moon in 2034 and fly to dozens of locations on its surface, may provide the real answer to whether the sand dunes on Titan are actually made of Comet dust?
(Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASI/ESA and USGS/ESA)
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