"History is a wonderful thing, if only it was true"
-Tolstoy

Sunday, January 07, 2007

Hydrocarbons ... Where?

Hydrocarbons from sources other than "living things"?

"Fossil Fuels"?

Below Haze, Saturn’s Biggest Moon Has Lakes - New York Times:

"Finding large bodies of liquid methane and probably ethane on Titan, in lakes or perhaps vast seas, had long been hypothesized, based on telescope observations of that moon’s smoggy methane-rich atmosphere and by the two Voyager spacecraft that passed close some 30 years ago. But the Cassini remote-sensing instruments had failed to detect an ocean, though they and the European Space Agency’s Huygens lander did find traces of the channels where liquids had apparently flowed across the surface."

and

"Jonathan I. Lunine of the University of Arizona, another member of the discovery team, described in an interview what the lakes probably look like. The methane liquid would be transparent, enough to see the dark hydrocarbon sediments on the floor of shallow lakes. The liquid would be less viscous than water, perhaps like gasoline. Overhead, aerosols, minute particles in the upper atmosphere, presumably cast a dim orange light on the lake. In the dark of winter, one would need a flashlight to walk the shore."

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