The Study: "The Sequestration of Ethane on Titan in Smog Particles" by Donald M. Hunten, published in the journal Nature.
The Motive: Since the early 1980s, astronomers have postulated that a vast, sloshing sea of liquid ethane half a mile deep may cover the surface of Saturn's giant moon, Titan. That would be the only other known ocean in the cosmos besides Earth's. In theory, sunlight should glint off Titan's ethane waves, yet measurements using NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii have failed to detect such reflections. Moreover, when the Huygens probe landed on Titan, it hit fairly solid ground. So where's the juice? Donald Hunten of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona at Tucson claims to know the answer: His observations of falling particles in Titan's atmosphere indicate that the putative ocean consists of a solid pile of "smust."
Although smust may sound like a ...
