In the ongoing search for the next habitable body, one of the candidates is Titan - Saturn's largest moon - and a new study recreates its atmosphere in a lab.
Tech giant IBM has led a new study that simulates the atmospheric conditions on TItan in a laboratory. They describe the details of this new experiment in a report titled "Imaging Titan's Organic Haze at Atomic Scale," appearing in the recent Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Led by Dr. Fabian Schulz and Dr. Julien Maillard, the new international study involves colleagues from the IBM Research Zurich in Switzerland, the University of Paris - Saclay and the University of Rouen at Mont-Saint-Aignan in France, and the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Germany.
The Search for the Next Earth
Aside from our native Earth, the general consensus across the scientific community suggests that the next best location for searching extraterrestrial life is the Red Planet, Mars. Evidence suggests that Mars has hosted large bodies of water, supported by the presence of clay compounds on its surface.
However, Mars is not the only planet that is potentially habitable. Studies have discovered hundreds, if not thousands, of other planets that have characteristics the same as our own Earth. These are exoplanets in the so-called Goldilocks Zone - a safe range from its host star - as well as the presence of water, and other atmospheric and physical characteristics.
As for Titan, while there has been no definitive evidence of life on the Saturn satellite, previous studies have already established its complex chemistry and unique environment - encouraging further studies that could help determine whether there has been, or there can be, life on it. Much of the modern knowledge about Titan has been provided by the Cassini mission, whose spacecraft orbited Saturn and even descended into its atmosphere in 2017, where it started losing contact with NASA, providing data up until that moment.
Clues on Titan's Early History
Scientists believe that about 2.8 billion years ago, Earth might've had a similar atmosphere with Titan, referring to the Earth's Mesoarchean Era. During this period, cyanobacteria with abilities for photosynthesis have started creating the first reef systems, beginning to convert the abundant carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to oxygen, leading to the chemical balance among the elements.
In Titan's atmosphere, a dense photochemical haze scatters light - believed to hold clues on how life began in the entire Solar System. Astrochemists have been examining organic materials called tholis - an umbrella term for different carbon-containing compounds that often aggregate and form upon exposure to the sun's UV light, or even in cosmic rays. In the study supported by IBM, researchers flooded a stainless-steel vessel with a combination of methane and nitrogen, subsequently triggering chemical reactions through the application of electricity on the setup.
"This paper shows ground-breaking new work in the use of atomic-scale microscopy to investigate the structures of complex, multi-ringed organic molecules. Typical analysis of laboratory-generated compounds using techniques such as mass spectroscopy reveals the relative proportions of the various elements, but not the chemical bonding and structure," commented Research Space Scientist Conor A. Nixon, from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, in the IBM news release.
"For this first time here we see the molecular architecture of synthetic compounds similar to those thought to cause the orange haze of Titan's atmosphere. This application now provides an exciting new tool for sample analysis of astrobiological materials, including meteorites and returned samples from planetary bodies."
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