Titan And Earth: Intriguing Similarities

Saturn the 6th planet from the sun is also the second largest planet after Jupiter in the Solar system. It is a giant gas orb which has an average radius of approximately nine times that of the blue planet, our Earth. It is named after the Roman God of wealth and agriculture. Amongst all the other planets in our solar system Saturn is the least dense and also a flattened ball. Saturn also has a whopping 62 moons and the rings of Saturn are actually made almost entirely of water and ice, with a trace component of rocky material. Saturn also spins very fast on its axis that the planet flattens itself out into an oblate spheroid. It is the rapid spinning that causes the squishing effect causing the equator of Saturn to bulge out. 

Initially when Galileo saw Saturn through his rudimentary telescope he mistook the rings to be two large moons stuck on either side of the planet. However, it was the Dutch astronomer Christian Huygens who with the help of better telescope observed Saturn to find that those that were thought to be moons were actually rings. Huygens also was the first to discover Saturn's largest moon, Titan.
NASA space agency confirmed that Saturn is quickly losing its rings due to the pull of the planet's magnetic field. It is estimated that the entire rings system will be gone in 300 million years and at the rate in which the materials from the rings are falling into the planet equator the rings may have less than 100 million years to live.
While Jupiter has 67 moons Saturn follows closely with 62 moons out of which some of these are large like Titan which is also the second largest moon in the solar system while most are small moons just a few kilometers across and are yet to be officially named. Some of these moons were discovered just few years back by NASA's Cassini Orbiter and there is a possibility of more that might get discovered in years to come.
Saturn's moon Titan is a distant and frigid in nature but has intriguing similarities to Earth's terrain. The landscape is dotted with liquid lakes and seas. However, these are filled with methane and ethane. Theories also suggest that these liquid bodies might have actually exploded into existence, which means that Titan may share yet another similarity with Earth: that of climate change. The steep rims that surround Titan that reach hundreds of feet high could be a result of the explosion of the warming nitrogen which created the basins in Titan's crust.

By: Madhuchanda Saxena
Content: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/09/190910114251.htm