January 27, 2025 — Southwest Research Institute partnered with the Carnegie Institution for Science to perform laboratory experiments to better understand how Saturn’s moon Titan can maintain its unique nitrogen-rich atmosphere.
Titan is the second largest moon in our solar system and the only one that has a significant atmosphere.
“While just 40% the diameter of the Earth, Titan has an atmosphere 1.5 times as dense as the Earth’s, even with a lower gravity,” said SwRI’s Dr. Kelly Miller, lead author of a paper about these findings published in the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta. “Walking on the surface of Titan would feel a bit like scuba diving.”
The origin, age, and evolution of this atmosphere, which is roughly 95% nitrogen and 5% methane, has puzzled scientists since it was discovered in 1944.
“The presence of methane is critical to the existence of Titan’s atmosphere,” Miller says. “The methane is removed by reactions caused by sunlight and would disappear in about 30 million years after which the atmosphere would freeze onto the surface. Scientists think an internal source must replenish the methane, or else the atmosphere has a geologically short lifetime.”
Miller was also the lead author of a 2019 paper published in the Astrophysical Journal that proposed a theoretical model of how the atmosphere may have developed and is replenished over the years. The paper theorizes that large amounts of highly complex organic materials are heated up in Titan’s rocky interior, releasing nitrogen as well as carbon gases like methane. The gas then seeps out at the surface, where it forms a thick atmosphere around the moon. This theory is corroborated by the recent experiments that heated organic materials to temperatures of 250 to 500 Celsius at pressures up to 10 kilobars to simulate the interior conditions of Titan. The experiments produced carbon gases like carbon dioxide and methane in sufficient quantities to help supply Titan’s atmospheric reservoir.
The paper is largely based on data from NASA’s Cassini-Huygens spacecraft mission, which launched in 1997 and explored the Saturn system from 2004 to 2017. NASA plans to launch its next mission to the Saturnian system in 2028 with a spacecraft dubbed Dragonfly. It will include a quadcopter designed to explore Titan up close and investigate whether environments at Titan could have ever been conducive for life. Miller is working next with a global team of researchers to study the habitability of the subsurface liquid ocean.`
To access the Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta paper “Experimental heating of complex organic matter at Titan’s interior conditions supports contributions to atmospheric N2 and CH4” see http://doi.org/10.1016/j.gca.2024.12.026. For more information, visit Planetary Science or contact Mike Thomas, +1 210 522 2255, Communications Department, Southwest Research Institute, 6220 Culebra Road, San Antonio, TX 78238-5166.