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Saturn’s moon Titan glowing at dusk and dawn: Nasa

WASHINGTON: In a potentially ‘groundbreaking discovery’, scientists led by Nasa have found large patches of trace gases shining brightly near the north and south poles of Saturn's moon Titan during the moon's dusk and dawn. The pair of patches was spotted by a Nasa-led international team of researchers investigating the chemical make-up of Titan's atmosphere.

The large patches of trace gases were spotted shining brightly near the north and south poles. These regions are curiously shifted off the poles, to the east or west, so that dawn is breaking over the southern region while dusk is falling over the northern one, researchers said. ‘This is an unexpected and potentially groundbreaking discovery,’ said Martin Cordiner, an astrochemist working at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the lead author of the study. ‘These kinds of east-to-west variations have never been seen before in Titan’s atmospheric gases. Explaining their origin presents us with a fascinating new problem,’ he adde.

The mapping comes from observations made by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a network of high-precision antennas in Chile. At the wavelengths used by these antennas, the gas-rich areas in Titan’s atmosphere glowed brightly. Because of ALMA’s sensitivity, the researchers were able to obtain spatial maps of chemicals in Titan’s atmosphere from a “snapshot” observation that lasted less than three minutes.
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