Titan’s Strange Chemical World is simulated in small tubes

Landscape Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, is famous and very strange. Like Earth, Titan falls on rivers, lakes, clouds, and raindrops, as well as ice mountains and a thick atmosphere. But instead of water, Titan’s chemical cycle is made up of liquid methane, a carbon, and an organic molecule made up of four hydrogen atoms. Researchers believe that this rotating mixture of methane, combined with the moon’s nitrogen-filled atmosphere, surface water ice, and perhaps the energy of volcanic or meteorite impact, could have been the perfect recipe to create some sort of simple life form. This is why Titan is one of the potential sites of life in the Solar System, along with Jupiter frozen moon Europe.

Several expeditions are preparing to embark on these distant worlds in the coming decade: a European mission to Europe 2022an, NASA’s Europa Clipper In 2024, and the innovative NASA Dragonfly copter 2027 in Titan.

Before these spacecraft departed, scientists want to know how the planetary chemistry of these moons works. Now a researcher has recreated Titan’s environment in a small glass cylinder and mixed organic chemicals under the same temperature and pressure conditions found on that moon. Organic molecules that are liquid on Earth — such as methane and benzene — turn into solid frozen mineral crystals on Titan because they are so cold, sometimes as far as -290 Fahrenheit. Tomče Runčevski, An assistant professor of chemistry at Southern Methodist University, and principal investigator of the experiment presented at a meeting of the American Chemical Society this week.

In several experiments, Runčevski took small glass tubes, sucked in air with a pump, and added ice water. He then added nitrogen, methane, his chemical relative ethane, and other organic compounds one by one. Each time, he changed the composition of the chemical mixture inside the glass cylinders to see what would happen. He then applied pressure – equivalent to 1.45 times the Earth’s atmosphere – and reduced the temperature by surrounding the flask with very cold air.

“We present a sequence of chemicals as they would enter Titan,” says Runčevski. “We would put it first [the glass tube] in order to escape all the oxygen in the vacuum, we then put methane to mimic Titan’s atmosphere. And then we introduce and study other organic molecules. “

Under the atmospheric pressure and temperature of the Moon, he discovered that many Titan and two organic molecules that are toxic to humans on Earth — acetonitrile and propionitrile — become a single crystalline form. On Titan, these two molecules are made up of a combination of nitrogen and methane, plus solar energy, Saturn’s magnetic field, and cosmic rays. Acetonitrile and propionitrile begin as atmospheric gases, then condense into aerosols and then fall to the surface of the lunar rain and become part of solid minerals of various shapes.

I understand that you have reached chemical overload. But if you’re concerned with biology, or more specifically exobiology, science life on other planets, then are the critical forms and forms of chemical compounds. This is the first time that chemicals have combined in a crystal form on Earth twice under the conditions on Titan.

Another important finding is that the outer face of the crystal also has an electric charge or polarity on the surface. This surface charge could attract other molecules, such as water – would be needed to form the main components of life based on carbon.

This new experiment does not prove that Titan is alive, but it does mean that researchers can discover new things about its strange, cold surface environment even before NASA’s Dragonfly spacecraft land there. “We can’t say that Titan has life or not, but we can definitely say that the conditions of life are there,” says Runčevski. “Titan is the closest thing to Earth, to the fact that life is similar to life on Earth.”