Sentences with phrase «methane rain»

The methane in Titan's atmosphere has a similar cycle to water on Earth; it evaporates into the atmosphere from the large lakes, condenses as clouds and falls as methane rain on Titan's hydrocarbon - rich landscape, creating rivers and sculpting valleys.

What's more, scientists have been seeing evidence of seasonal weather — in the form of dark zones that may be lakes filling with methane rain — ever since Cassini arrived in 2004.

Titan's liquid methane rain appears to play a major role in shaping its icy surface, and the downpours are much more common than researchers expected.

The same day, the Cassini spacecraft makes the first of 13 extremely close 2006 swings past Saturn's enigmatic moon Titan, a world of methane rain and ice volcanoes.

Methane rains then eroded these layers, forming sand - sized particles.

That discovery means Titan has a mechanism to rebuild its surface, which would otherwise have been flattened by constant methane rain.

Organic soot steadily settles out of Titan's atmosphere, so something — possibly methane rain — must scour these light areas clean.

Schaller's team could not confirm whether precipitation fell, but other studies have offered strong evidence that methane clouds on Titan dump methane rain in a cycle much like the exchange of water between the atmosphere and the surface of Earth.

Studies have detected methane rain on Titan and more than 20 lakes of methane at the moon's north pole.

Now a telescope has peered through the eternal haze to reveal rare low - lying methane clouds that may occasionally sprinkle the moon with methane rain.

The organic - rich environment, coupled with liquid methane rain, wowed astrobiologists, while the exotic surface fascinated geologists.

Research in the past several months has further fueled the excitement, yielding new hints of liquid water on Enceladus and revealing ethane lakes and methane rain on Titan.

The researchers succeeded and took video footage of ethane - methane rain and snow.

Malaska works as a volunteer for the Cassini team in his spare time and at the conference he described a winding channel flowing into a south Titan lake that follows a path very similar to a stretch of the lower Mississippi river — and thus might carry a comparably vast flow after a methane rain.

Methane rain should fall on the lakes but it is vastly more volatile than ethane and propane, so it probably evaporates much faster from lakes, leaving the heavier hydrocarbons behind.

Methane rain had soaked the surface»

The findings led Turtle's group to report that methane rain — dubbed «April showers» by the team — had soaked the area and the fluid had evaporated or soaked into the ground (Science, vol 331, p 1414).

The methane rain that seems to have carved its surface would stop.