I HEART CHAOS

For years, scientists have suspected that a giant ocean of liquid water may be sloshing around underneath the frozen surface of Titan, and new information from NASA’s Cassini probe may have found new evidence for the liquid ocean theory.

So Baland and her colleagues crunched Cassini’s numbers in even greater detail. They found that Titan’s orbital behavior indeed makes sense if the moon is assumed to have a solid interior surrounded by a liquid-water ocean, which itself sits beneath an icy “shell.”

Current thinking about Titan’s formation and evolution suggests that this ocean would be composed primarily of water – perhaps with a dash of ammonia – rather than hydrocarbons or some other substance, Baland said.

If this were the case, Titan would join several other frigid moons in the outer solar system – such as Saturn’s moon Enceladus and Jupiter’s Europa – in the water-ocean club. Other lines of evidence point to this same conclusion. The entire surface of Titan, for example, appears to be sliding around, suggesting that the moon’s crust and core are separated by a layer of liquid water. Models of Titan’s internal heat flow support this idea as well.

Read more here