Saturn moon gives clues about early life on Earth
Scientists conduct lab experiments based on conditions in Titan’s atmosphere measured last year by Huygens probe Will Dunham Washington : Billions of years ago, Earth may have been shrouded in a blanket of atmospheric haze like that seen on Saturn’s moon Titan, providing organic material that nourished our planet’s earliest life forms, researchers said on Monday. Some scientists look to Titan as a model for what early Earth’s atmosphere may have looked like. They think Titan’s atmosphere, packed with organic aerosol particles created when sunlight reacts with methane gas, may offer clues about Earth’s climate when primitive organisms were first arising 3.6 billion years ago. University of Colorado scientist Margaret Tolbert and her colleagues conducted lab experiments based on conditions in Titan’s atmosphere measured last year by the Huygens space probe. They irradiated methane gas with an ultraviolet lamp, then mixed in carbon dioxide to see whether conditions that may have existed e...