Whoops! We May Have Been Wrong About That Whole ‘Underground Ocean On Saturn’s Moon’ Thing
The new guess as to what is there is way less cool...
One of my favorite things about my freshman year of college wasn't the hitting clubs or going to frat parties. That's mainly because I didn't do either of those things, so, instead, I was digging my General Astronomy class.
I had a cool professor who taught us about all kinds of space stuff, but would also dip into some fun stuff like explaining why Han Solo has no clue what a parsec is.
Since parsecs measure distance, not time, what does it mean to do the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs?
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We also talked about the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and how the most likely place we'd find it in our solar system is on Titan, Saturn's largest moon, since it was believed to have a giant ocean under its surface.
That's hard to even comprehend. It's some serious Jules Verne Journey to the Center of the Earth s--t.
Imagine what could be in that ocean. Big, Lovecraftian sea monstrosities swimming around under a layer of ice… or more likely, microscopic bacteria just floating around.
Maybe they'd be Lovecraftian too… We can hope, right?
It has long been thought that there was an underground ocean on Titan, Saturn's largest moon, but that may not be the case. (Getty Images)
But a new study has just claimed that we've been wrong about Titan this whole time. There may not be an ocean there, and instead it's just a bunch of comparatively lame ice and slush with pockets of melted water.
That's way less cool than an underground ocean, isn't it?
According to the Associated Press, the new hypothesis about what's on Titan comes from the ̶e̶g̶g̶h̶e̶a̶d̶s̶ scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who took another look at some old information from the Cassini spacecraft that used to buzz around Saturn.
However, while the assumptions about the underground ocean may not be accurate, the bright side is that Titan is still regarded as one of the prime locations for extraterrestrial life. It's believed that organisms could survive in those pockets of melted water.
The University of Washington's Baptiste Journaux — who took part in this study — even wrote that "there is strong justification for continued optimism regarding the potential for extraterrestrial life."
That's very cool… just not as cool as an underground ocean.