Enormous lakes and seas filled with liquid methane on the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan may have been crafted by the power of waves.
Titan is Saturn’s largest moon and the second-largest moon in our solar system, after Jupiter’s Ganymede, and is the only body in our solar system other than Earth to possess lakes, seas, and rivers—filled with methane and ethane rather than water.
According to a new paper in the journal Science Advances, these bizarre water bodies, some of which are around the same size as the Great Lakes, may have been shaped by waves.
“We found that if the coastlines have eroded, their shapes are more consistent with erosion by waves than by uniform erosion or no erosion at all,” study co-author Taylor Perron, a professor of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences at MIT, said in a statement.
Titan has a diameter of about 3,200 miles, making it larger than the planet Mercury. Its thick atmosphere is about 1.5 times as dense as ours, primarily made of nitrogen with small amounts of methane and hydrogen.
These huge lakes were confirmed to exist in 2007 after NASA‘s Cassini spacecraft flew by the moon. Ever since, the methods of their formation and shape have mystified scientists.
