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The moon of Saturn Titan has a mysterious ice formation that extends almost halfway up its massive surface.
Scientists, who do not know what type of geological feature the ice block can say, have based their new research on data collected from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which has spent 13 years examining the Saturn system.
"This is a good example of how we are really succeeding in harnessing this amazing data from Cassini to get new results," said Jani Radebaugh, a scientist in planetary sciences at Brigham Young University, who said: Did not participate in the new research, told Space.com. "We are far from having figured out Titan as far as possible with Cassini."
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Titan, which is 50% larger than the Earth 's moon, has a nitrogen – rich atmosphere containing methane, hydrogen and other gases, where liquids composed of organic compounds are present. water on the surface. The temperature of the moon's surface is icy: -179.2 degrees Celsius. Titan receives only 0.1% of the light captured by the Earth.
"What interests us is what's going on beyond this soft global snowfall of organic matter?" Radebaugh told Space.com. "It can be very difficult to see through this layer to see what happens."
Researchers used a technique called principal component analysis, which allows them to detect smaller elements in the data that could otherwise be ignored, according to Space.com.
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Nevertheless, scientists have said more research is needed to discover the exact cause of the ice found on Titan's surface.
"It's a big feature that tells us something about how Titan was in the past, but we do not really know what it is," Caitlin Griffith, lead author of Caitlin Griffith, told Caitlin Griffith. Science, specialist in planetary sciences at the University of Arizona. "I think at the moment, it's basically saying that it's complicated, that the surface is quite complicated."
The research is described in an article published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
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