A team of astronomers who had been creating a survey of stars at the Max-Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidlberg, Germany have detected a planetary system – 375 light-years away in the constellation Cetus – that is nearly as old as the universe.

The star in the system, designated HIP 11952, is estimated to be 12.8 billion years old, having formed just a billion years after the Big Bang. Our system, by comparison, is only 4.6 billion years old. Two gas giant planets, HIP 11952b and HIP 11952c, each the size of Jupiter, orbit HIP 11952 and have an orbital period of seven days and nine and a half months, respectively.

The age of this system is certainly stunning, but the composition of the HIP 11952 and its planets are what baffles astronomers: they lack the presence of heavy elements (carbon, oxygen, and iron, for example), contradicting a major aspect of the Accretion theory.

Basically, the Accretion theory describes how solar systems are born and develop, but it also states that planets need a high concentration of heavy elements to form. Many planets that astronomers have studied before the discovery of the HIP 11952 system have all been made of many heavy elements. Even the gas giants in our own solar system contain them – mostly metals in their cores, which need these elements in order to form.

However, shortly after the Big Bang, the lighter elements (hydrogen and helium) dominated the universe. Stars were just beginning to form. Only when these first stars went nova did heavy elements exist, but this must have occurred billions of years following the Big Bang, considering the average lifespan of stars.

Despite the contradiction brought forth by the HIP 11952 system, the Accretion theory is still backed-up by evidence of other planets – largely detected by the NASA spacecraft Kepler – that are composed of heavier elements. These planets and their parent stars, however, are young in comparison with the universe’s age.

Nonetheless, the fact that HIP 11952b, and HIP 11952c exist proves that planets are able to form without the presence of heavy elements and, therefore, have astronomers considering new possibilities of how planets come into being. To solve the Accretion theory issue, they would need to further find and study older and metal-poor planets.

“We would like to discover and study more planetary systems of this kind,” Anna Pasquali tells Huffington Post. Pasquali is a co-author of the team’s paper and is from the Center for Astronomy at Heidelberg University (ZAH). “That would allow us to refine our theories of planet formation. The discovery of the planets of HIP 11952 shows that planets have been forming throughout the life of our Universe.”

According to their paper, the team accounts for the lack of heavy elements and HIP 11952’s long age by surmising that HIP 11952 is a dwarf star, a type of star that has low metallicity and a long lifespan.

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On March 17th, NASA’s spacecraft MESSENGER revealed surprising details about Mercury’s interior and topography, changing astronomers’ understanding of the small planet and how it was formed.

MESSENGER (MErcury Space Surface ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) is the first spacecraft sent to orbit and study Mercury, which orbits the Sun a mere 36 million miles away. It’s the innermost and hottest planet in our solar system. MESSENGER was launched in August 2004. Before traveling to Mercury, it made a series of flybys around the Earth (once) and Venus (twice).

MESSENGER finally arrived at Mercury on March 18, 2011 and went around three times. Using radio signals, the spacecraft studied Mercury’s gravitational field, magnetic field, topography, internal geological structure, and chemical composition. Because the results of MESSENGER’S flybys around Mercury were so valuable, its mission was extended to last for another year in November 2011.

Mercury’s topography has changed many times since Mercury was fully formed, meaning that there has been a considerable amount of geological activity. For that reason, before studying any of the planet’s internal structure and history, MESSENGER first produced an accurate map of Mercury’s gravitational field using information derived from the planet’s topography and spin state.

Thereafter, two studies were conducted simultaneously, examining Mercury’s internal structure and geography. In one study, the researchers involved with MESSENGER discovered that the planet’s core was much larger than previously thought: it takes up 85 percent of the planet’s radius. Furthermore, it is liquid instead of solid. Previously, scientists assumed that Mercury would have been cooled enough by now for the core to be solid.

Above the core lies an unusual layer that is composed of solid sulphur and iron – a layer not found in the other rocky planets in the Solar System. The outer layers of the internal structure consist of a solid silicate crust and mantle. It is thought that inside the larger liquid core lies a smaller solid core composed of sulphur and iron.

The other study of Mercury’s topography produced other surprising discoveries. When MESSENGER’s Mercury Laser Altimeter (MLA) produced a topographic model of the northern hemisphere and areas in the mid-latitude range, researchers learned that the elevation spread is smaller than similar regions on the Moon and Mars. The area that sticks out the most is lowlands that contain the northern volcanic plains.

Moreover, according to the Carnegie Institute for Science’s press release,

“… the interior plains of Caloris impact basin — 1,550 kilometers (960 miles) in diameter — have been modified so that part of the basin floor now stands higher than the rim. The elevated portion appears to be part of a quasi-linear rise that extends for approximately half the planetary circumference at mid-latitudes. These features imply that large-scale changes to Mercury’s topography occurred after the era of impact basin formation and large-scale emplacement of volcanic plains had ended.”

This new knowledge of Mercury’s internal structure and topography gives insight as to how Mercury formed thermally and how the planet’s magnetic field is generated. Details of the findings of each study from MESSENGER’s mission will appear in two separate papers, which will appear on March 23 in the journal Science.

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Instead of coming back on December 21, 2012 – the infamous apocalyptic date – the newly discovered asteroid 2012 DA14 is not expected to return around February 15, 2013. For now, humanity can breathe easy.

A group of amateur astronomers working at Observatorio Astronómico de La Sagra (La Sagra Sky Survey), located in the Andalusia Mountains of southeast Spain, discovered the asteroid a month ago, on February 22. The group accidently spotted it in an area of the sky where asteroids are not generally seen, and was only able to detect it when it flew by the Earth at a range of seven times the distance from the Earth to the Moon. 2012 DA14 was difficult to notice because of its small size; it has a diameter of around 50 meters (150 feet).

Come February 15, 2013, 2012 DA14 fly past 24,000 km (15,000 miles) away, much closer than most of our commercial satellites orbit the Earth. One would be able to view it with binoculars, but at that distance, the asteroid would not even skim the atmosphere, let alone hit the Earth.

Phil Plait, former Hubble Space Telescope member and astronomy teacher, assures in his blog Bad Astronomy, “In astronomical terms, [that distance] is pretty close, but in real human terms it’s a clean miss.”

The asteroid’s orbit is inclined in comparison to the Earth’s and lasts for 366.24 days, which is extremely close to that of the Earth, being only one day longer. Due to the nature of its orbit, 2012 DA14 will most likely not ever cause an impact – no matter what other sources assert.

Earlier this month, La Sagra joined the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Space Situation Awareness (SSA) program, which searches for hazards in or that will enter Earth’s orbit and cause harm or pose a risk to life, such as (as stated on their website) “remnant man-made space objects, in-orbit explosions and release events, potential impacts of Near Earth Objects, the effects of space weather phenomena on space- and ground-based infrastructure.” Together, La Sagra and SSA will search for asteroids and miscellaneous space objects that may pose as a threat to the Earth.

In addition to keeping track of the smaller asteroid, when 2012 DA14 approaches again, astronomers will jump at the opportunity to study it and measure the gravitational effects of the Earth and Moon that affect it. After 2013, the asteroid is not expected to return until 2020

According to ESA, the SSA program is developing a system of telescopes that will be able to detect any asteroids around the size of 2012 DA14 – just in case.

“I can’t say this strongly enough: asteroid 2012 DA14 is not an impact threat for February 2013,” Plait continues to write. “However, we definitely need to keep our eyes on this guy to see if it poses a threat at some future date.”

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On February 27, the team of astronomers involved with NASA’s spacecraft Kepler published their most recent catalog of exoplanets (short for extrasolar planets, which are planets beyond our solar system) that Kepler has detected.

Data from the newest catalog is cumulative and includes information from the two catalogues created in June 2010 and February 2011. As of now, the total number of exoplanets Kepler has detected is 2,321, which orbit 1,790 stars. A full 93% are smaller than Neptune, the smallest of the gas giants in the solar system. Over 200 are Earth-sized and more than 900 are smaller than twice the size of the Earth’s diameter. There are 46 exoplanets located in the habitable zone, 10 of which are Earth-sized.

“With each new catalog release a clear progression toward smaller planets at longer orbital periods is emerging,” Natalie Batalha, Kepler deputy science team lead at San Jose State University in California, states in NASA’s press release. “This suggests that Earth-size planets in the habitable zone are forthcoming if, indeed, such planets are abundant.”

Furthermore, the percent for more than one planet orbiting a star has increased to 20 percent from last year’s 17 percent (many other planets are rogue, unattached to a parent star, twirling alone in space). More and detailed statistics can be found here.

Three methods can be utilized to find exoplanets: gravitational lensing, radial-velocity, and transiting. Kepler largely uses the latter method, using the software Transiting Planet Search (TPS) pipeline module, because it has proven to produce more results compared to the former two. Transiting works as thus: one measures a star’s periodic drop in brightness due to an object – in the most hopeful scenario, a planet – passing in front of the star.

Sifting through 150,000 stars, Kepler detected around 5,000 transit signals, through which the spacecraft had more to sort. One can easily misidentify an object to be an exoplanet when using the transiting method; one may instead find a binary star system, which contains two stars that orbit and eclipse one another. To confirm its detection of a planet, Kepler has to record the transit at least three times.

Kepler was launched in mid-2009 to find Earth-like exoplanets that are able to sustain water and life. These planets would have to be located in the habitable zone, an area in which a planet must orbit a star in order for liquid water to exist on its surface. Kepler goes about attempting to detect exoplanets by looking at their parent stars first, largely searching for G-type stars, or Sun-like stars (or at least stars a part of the Main Sequence), which astronomers believe to be ideal parent stars.

For much of the time Kepler began exploring, it mostly detected gas giants tens of times larger than Jupiter. As the spacecraft endured, it began, recently, to find numerous smaller rocky planets. Soon after, astronomers working with Kepler have calculated that there are more of these kinds of planets than there are gas giants.

Kepler’s latest milestone includes Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f, which were detected this January and are the first Earth-sized planets known to exist. Another milestone occurred in December 2011, when Kepler discovered super-Earth Kepler-22b, the first known exoplanet in the habitable zone.

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Last Friday, NASA’s Cassini mission detected molecular oxygen ions on Dione- one of Saturn’s moons- indicating that the moon has an atmosphere. The team involved with the mission includes researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the European Space Agency, and the Italian Space Agency, all of which are a part of collaboration with NASA’s Cassini-Huygens mission.

“We now know that Dione, in addition to Saturn’s rings and the moon Rhea, is a source of oxygen molecules,” Robert Tokar, says to NASA. Tokar, the head author of the team’s paper, is a researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “This shows that molecular oxygen is actually common in the Saturn system and reinforces that it can come from a process that doesn’t involve life.”

Cassini, launched in 1997 and arriving on Saturn in 2004, spotted the molecular oxygen ions in a flyby with one of its active sensors, the Cassini Plasma Spectrometer (CAPS) in 2010, when the researchers at Los Alamos were able to first notice them. Prior, the existence of the ions was postulated after NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope detected ozone. Only after Cassini studied Dione during its flyby, was their postulation confirmed.

Dione was discovered by Giovannia Cassini (after which the titular spacecraft was named) in 1684. As one of the 62 moons revolving around Saturn, it is the tiniest, having a diameter of around 1130km (700 miles). Dione is best known for its pockmarked surface, which is composed of a thick layer of solid water ice. Underneath the surface lies a possible layer of liquid water and a small rocky core.

The distance at which Dione orbits Saturn is the same distance as the Earth from the Sun. The tiny moon’s orbital period lasts every 2.7 days. Because Dione is well within Saturn’s magnetosphere, the ions from the magnetosphere bombard Dione’s surface, and molecular oxygen ions are then created.

These ions bounce off and are dispersed around the planet, creating an atmosphere, albeit a very thin one. According to NASA, there is “one [ion] for every 0.67 cubic inches of space (one for every 11 cubic centimeters of space) or about 2,550 per cubic foot (90,000 per cubic meter).”

“The concentration of oxygen in Dione’s atmosphere is roughly similar to what you would find in Earth’s atmosphere at an altitude of about 300 miles,” Tokar states in Los Alamos National Laboratory’s press release. “It’s not enough to sustain life, but—together with similar observations of other moons around Saturn and Jupiter—these are definitive examples of a process by which a lot of oxygen can be produced in icy celestial bodies that are bombarded by charged particles or photons from the Sun or whatever light source happens to be nearby.”

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This week, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) spacecraft, Kepler, detected eleven planetary systems, which, overall, contain 26 new exoplanets (short for extrasolar planets, which exist beyond out solar system). Located in the Lyra and Cygnus constellations, each system contains two to five planets. The systems have been dubbed Kepler-23, Kepler-24, Kepler-25, Kepler-26, Kepler-27, Kepler-28, Kepler-29, Kepler-30, Kepler-31, Kepler-32, and Kepler-33.

The sizes of the exoplanets range from 1.5 to 5 times the size of Earth to larger than Jupiter. All of them orbit their parent stars closely; none of them lie in the habitable zone, an area in which a planet is not too close or too far away from a star so that it can sustain water and life. Each of their orbits is closer than that of Venus. The farthest exoplanet has years that last fewer than 200 days and the surface temperature of hundreds of degrees.

Kepler primarily detects planets through a process known as transiting, in which it measures a star’s periodic change in brightness generated by a planet crossing its parent star, causing the star’s light to drop a bit in brightness.

The NASA spacecraft was able to find these newer exoplanets by means of measuring Transit Timing Variations (TTVs). With this method, Kepler calculates changes in the acceleration of planets due to the gravitational pull on one another from being so close together. TTVs help Kepler find the more distant – hence fainter – star systems.

“Prior to the Kepler mission, we knew of perhaps 500 exoplanets across the whole sky,” said Doug Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, in the press release on NASA’s Kepler website.

“Now,” Hudgins continues, “in just two years staring at a patch of sky not much bigger than your fist, Kepler has discovered more than 60 planets and more than 2,300 planet candidates. This tells us that our galaxy is positively loaded with planets of all sizes and orbits.”

Kepler has been in space for nearly three years. Its mission is to search for Earth-like exoplanets that orbit stars in the habitable zone. Ever since its launch in March 2009, Kepler has made numerous momentous findings, especially in the last couple of months.

On December 5, the spacecraft detected Kepler-22b, the first planet to be found in a habitable zone, and on December 20, it discovered the first two Earth-sized exoplanets, Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f. Kepler’s most recent significant detection occurred earlier this month: exoplanets KOI-961.01, KOI-961.02, and KOI-961.03, the tiniest exoplanets thus far.

Based on the diversity of the types of exoplanets, astronomers believe they will attain a better understanding of how planets form.

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At the 119th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin, Texas, an international team of astronomers working at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile presented their findings: they had discovered a small object, surrounded by dust rings, orbiting a star.

“This marks the first time astronomers have detected an extrasolar ring system transiting a Sun-like star, and the first system of discrete, thin, dust rings detected around a very low-mass object outside of our solar system,” Eric Mamajek stated in a University of Rochester press release. Mamajek is the Assistant professor in Physics and Astronomer at the University of Rochester. “But many questions remain about what exactly has been discovered.”

In 2007, Mamajek and his colleagues began investigating light curves – measuring changes in light intensity – of stars in the Scorpius-Centaurus association (the nearest massive star formation region) which lies 420 light-years away from the Earth. For a particular star, they noticed multiple erratic blips in its light.

The star, dubbed 1SWASP J140747.93-394542.6, is similar to the Sun in mass and composition, though it is extremely young, having an age of only sixteen million years. In comparison, the Sun is approximately five billion years old.

The object in question that was causing the blips could not have been a planet or another star. When a spherical body crosses in front of a star, the intensity of light from the star gradually dims and increases for a certain amount of time habitually. ?However, the transit of this object was too complex: the light’s intensity changed irregularly, and as much as 95% of the star’s light was blocked.

The team surmised that the abnormal blips were caused by dust from rings, and then concluded that what they had detected was a ringed body. However, none of the members are positive as to what the object could possibly be. Ideas range from a low-mass star or brown dwarf, a protoplanet, or a small planet whose rings may be forming into a moon.

The four rings that have been detected thus far are named “Rochester”, “Sutherland”, “Campanas,” and “Tololo.” The outermost ring’s orbital radius is tens of millions of kilometers, so the size and mass of the rings are much more immense than Saturn’s. According to the team, the object is a “Saturn on steroids.”

The team will calculate the radial velocity of the star and then measure the object’s gravitational tug on the star in order to find out the object’s mass and density. Hopefully, they will obtain the information from the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), which is currently being built in Chile.

The team believes they could be observing a later stage of planet formation. “Our inner solar system could’ve looked like this long ago in its first tens of millions of years,” Mamajek says. “I think these rings are how we’re going to study moon-forming disks around gas giants.”

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Astronomers part of the international collaboration Probing Lensing Anomalies NETwork (PLANET) calculated the approximate number of planets based on statistical analyses from multiple surveys gathered from observatories, institutions, and ground-based telescopes, including NASA’s spacecraft Kepler, the European Southern Observatory (ESO), the Niels Bohr Institute, the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE), and the Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics (MOA).

PLANET has taken 16 years to find planets, and six to make a statistical hypothesis (from 2002 to 2007). It is estimated that there are at least 100 billion stars in the Milky Way and that each one has 1.6 planets in orbit on average, coming to a total of 160 billion hypothetical planets. This number is much, much higher than the number originally predicted.

Astronomers use three methods to search for planets. The first one is called transiting, in which one observes a stars’ level of brightness. If the level slightly drops, the dip acts as a signal that a planet is crossing the star during its orbit. The second method is the radial-velocity method. When planets orbit a star, the star does not remain stationary.

Rather, it moves in a small circular motion, causing the planet’s gravitational pull. Lastly, the third method is gravitational microlensing. In relation to an observer on Earth, two stars, one in front of the other, seem to form a straight line. The foreground star causes light from the background star to curve, thus magnifying the latter. If there is a slight temporary difference in the light curve from the foreground star, a planet is orbiting the star.

With the former two methods, astronomers can only find low-mass planets closely orbiting stars. They are what the Kepler spacecraft uses to hunt for planets. The third one, on the other hand, is more sensitive: astronomers can find planets of all sizes (from Mercury-sized to Jupiter-sized) and those that are near and far from their parent stars. In addition, planets’ masses can be determined.

“Together,” Uffe Gråe Jørgensen states in the Niels Bohr Institute press release, “the three methods are, for the first time, able to say something about how common our own solar system is.” Jørgensen is the head of the Astrophysics and Planetary Science research group at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen.

Based on the collected data, astronomers predict that Earth-like planets (small and rocky) are much more common in the galaxy than gas giants like Jupiter. According to Stephen Kane – who is a part of NASA’s Exoplanet Science Institute at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California – in the HubbleSite press release, “This is encouraging news for investigations into habitable planets.”

Ultimately, this new hypothesis significantly increases the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial life, even sentient life.

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In 2009, NASA launched Kepler to search for planets outside the solar system – called extrasolar planets, or exoplanets – that are Earth-sized and have a chance of harboring life. As of December 2011, the spacecraft has discovered 2,326 exoplanets, over a hundred of which are likely candidates to meet the requirements.

A team of astronomers at NASA decided in early January to give Kepler an additional mission of hunting for extrasolar moons, or exomoons. The team believes in the potential existence of exomoons. Natural satellites only survive half the time when they and their companion planets are still undergoing evolution, though the many moons in our solar system increase the possibility.

With this new mission, titled Hunt of Exomoons with Kepler (HEK), Kepler may find life on these moons as well as on exoplanets and help astronomers understand planetary evolution and the formation of natural satellites. Kepler will first look at the exoplanets cataloged thus far to see if any of them have any such natural satellites. The exomoons would have to be similar in size, or larger, than our Moon because they would be easiest for the spacecraft to detect.

It is also possible that exomoons are capable of harboring life. In our solar system, Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus have liquid water beneath their surfaces. It is not known for sure if these two large moons contain life, though the presence of water heightens the probability as well as the probability that exomoons may be habitable.

Kepler will attempt to search for exomoons through two means: dynamical effects and eclipses features. With dynamical effects, the spacecraft would observe and measure the gravitational effect between the exoplanet and the exomoon (i.e. how much they tug on each other).

The amount of gravitational effects on the two bodies would determine whether or not the system would be a planet-moon system or a binary-planet system (it would be easy for the former to be mistaken with the latter). With eclipse features, Kepler would be on the lookout for solar and lunar eclipses, involving the exomoon, its companion planet, and their star. Kepler would see if the exomoon may make subtle changes in a star’s brightness through eclipsing the star, which would drop a bit in brightness.

Once Kepler finds an exomoon, it would be able to determine its size and mass based on the gravitational effect and eclipse features. Upon discovering the size and mass, it would then calculate the density. Thereafter, the exomoon’s composition can be determined, giving insight as to how to the exomoon formed and, ultimately, revealing the process of planetary evolution.

“Extrasolar moons represent an outstanding challenge in modern observational astronomy,” writes head author David Kipping in the team’s paper. Kipping,  a member of the team at NASA, is an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“Their detection and study would yield a revolution in the understanding of planet/moon formation and evolution, but perhaps most provocatively, they could be frequent seats for life in the Galaxy.”

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In early January, researchers at the California Institute of California (Caltech) created a computer model that reproduces Titan’s atmosphere and methane cycle, solving Titan’s weather phenomena that were once inexplicable.

Having a surface temperature of approximately -300°F (-183°C), Titan is one of Saturn’s largest moons. It has a thick atmosphere of methane, a gas deadly for humans. Titan, the only other planetary body in the solar system that has large bodies of liquid on the surface, contains lakes and precipitation of liquid methane. For nearly a decade, researchers at Caltech have noticed bizarre geographical settings and meteorological occurrences.

The first was noticed in 2009 by Odel Aharonson, leader of planetary science at Caltech. He noted that the lakes tended to cluster around Titan’s poles, more so in the northern pole than in the southern. This leaves areas around the equator very dry, lacking in clouds, precipitation, and bodies of liquid.

But in 2005, the space probe Huygens observed a presence of deep channels which look carved out by running liquid. Lastly, regions in the middle and around high altitudes contain clouds that cluster during Titan’s summer in the southern hemisphere.

Previously, scientists have created computer models to account for these meteorological mysteries, though none of them were successful. The newer model, which is three dimensional and simulates Titan’s atmosphere for the past 135 Titan years (equivalent to 3000 Earth years), manages to explain the phenomena by reproducing the distribution of clouds and lakes.

According to the newest model, more lakes exist in the northern hemisphere because Titan is farther from the Sun during the summer due to Saturn’s elliptical orbit, and since Titan is at the far end of Saturn’s orbit the, summer is longer in the northern pole. As Tapio Schneider explains in the Caltech press release, “Methane tends to collect in lakes around the poles because the sunlight there is weaker on average.”

Schneider is a co-author of the paper about the simulation’s findings published in the January 5th issue of Nature and is the Frank J. Gilloon Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering. Hence, without much heat from the Sun, the methane is unable to exist in the gaseous state at the north pole and remains in the liquid state.

To account for the second oddity, the model shows that Titan is closer to the Sun during the moon’s southern summer. Consequently, the rains are more intense here than in the northern hemisphere; however, the model further shows that more lakes exist in the north because storms occur more frequently than they do in the south.

This newer model also explains the presence of liquid-carved channels in the parched equator by producing a simulation that shows rain occurring during the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. Even though these rains are rare, they are quite intense: at the time of the equinoxes, Titan’s poles reverse, causing unstable weather patterns.

“The results for the first time give us a unified picture of how Titan’s methane cycle works,” Schneider tells Space.com. “What I find most satisfying is that many seemingly disparate observations – clouds, lakes, dry river beds – can be explained within one sparse and coherent framework.”

In addition to simulating its atmosphere and methane cycle, the model can also predict Titan’s weather several years in advance, similar to how we are able to predict Earth’s. For instance, the researchers have determined that lake levels will rise in the northern hemisphere for the next fifteen years, and over the next two years, more clouds will form at the north pole.

“This is just the beginning,” Scheinder adds. “We now have a tool to do new science with, and there’s a lot we can do and will do.”

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