E-Paper
Lake-like look on Saturn puzzles
US scientists have found a dark, lake-like feature on Saturn's moon Titan with smooth, shore like boundaries.
US scientists have found a dark, lake-like feature on Saturn's moon Titan with smooth, shore like boundaries.
The putative lake is 230 km by 70 km wide, about the size of Lake Ontario, on the US Canadian border, says science portal EurekAlert.org. "This feature is unique in our exploration of Titan so far," said Elizabeth Turtle, a scientist explaining the series of images captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft.
"Its perimeter is intriguingly reminiscent of the shorelines of lakes on earth, which are smoothed by water erosion and deposition." An alternative explanation is that this feature was once a lake but has since dried up, leaving behind dark deposits, Turtle said. Yet another possibility is that the lake is simply a broad depression filled by dark, solid hydrocarbons falling from the atmosphere onto Titan's surface.
In this case, the smooth outline might be the result of a process unrelated to rainfall, such as a sinkhole or a volcanic caldera - large crater formed by volcanic explosion or by collapse of a volcanic cone.
