Saturn's moon Titan is already an object of fascination to astronomers: The moon has seasonal weather patterns, a thick atmosphere, and lakes of liquid methane on its surface, and some scientists think it's one of the likeliest spots to find extraterrestrial life in our solar system. Now, researchers have found new evidence that the moon has cryovolcanoes,
which, in the cold of the outer Solar System, would spew a slurry of ice and liquid hydrocarbons, instead of lava. "It's as if it's a sort of constant bubbling cauldron that occasionally explodes big time," says Robert Nelson, a Cassini team scientist [Nature News].
The still-controversial theory regards an area of Titan called Hotei Arcus, which
appears to fluctuate in brightness on timescales of several months.... The cryovolcanism idea was bolstered in 2008, when observations of Hotei Arcus by a radar instrument aboard NASA's Cassini probe revealed structures that resembled lava flows ...
