News
More Stormy Weather on Titan Titan, it turns out, may be a very stormy place. In 2001, a group of astronomers led by Henry Roe, now a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology, discovered methane clouds near the south pole of Saturn's largest moon, resolving a debate about whether such clouds exist amid the haze of its atmosphere.Now Roe and his colleagues have found similar atmospheric disturbances at Titan's temperate mid-latitudes, about halfway between the equator and the poles. In a bit of ironic timing, the team made its discovery using two ground-based observatories, the Gemini North and Keck 2 telescopes on Mauna Kea, in Hawaii, in the months before the Cassini spacecraft arrived at Saturn and Titan. The work will appear in the January 1, 2005, issue of the Astrophysical Journal.
|