Thursday, 13 December, 2018

Titan

Titan

Posted on Friday, 21 October, 2016Sunday, 20 August, 2017 by Zheluo Cai

Titan.

Titan, the largest moon of the ringed gas giant planet of Saturn, is also the second largest moon in the Solar System, being slightly more voluminous than the planet Mercury. What makes it most unique, however, is that it is the only moon in the Solar System to sport anything more than a negligible trace atmosphere. It is also the only celestial body beyond Earth to have stable bodies of liquid on its surface. Just like Earth, it has lakes and rivers, but these are quite different to those which we know here on Earth. Titan’s extremely cold surface temperatures averaging about -180°C mean that water would only exist in the form of ice as hard as granite. However, instead of flowing with water, the rivers on the moon flow with a mixture of liquid methane and ethane which only exist as a gas in natural conditions on Earth. As if this were not bizarre enough, Titan also has a climate which, in many ways, is similar to Earth. It snows and rains with ethane and methane and it has storms, including a permanent hurricane on the south pole. Geologically, it is a young world with few craters and a surface marked by high plateaus and sandy dunes.

Lakes

Subsurface Reservoirs

Surface Pictures by Huygens

Cross Section

Cassini Spacecraft

Read Article Here:

http://www.space.com/15257-titan-saturn-largest-moon-facts-discovery-sdcmp.html

Arp 188 and the Tadpole's Tail.
Image Credit: Hubble Legacy Archive, ESA, NASA; Processing: Faus Márquez (AAE). Distant galaxies form a dramatic backdrop for this disrupted spiral galaxy Arp 188, the Tadpole Galaxy. It is 420 million light-years distant toward the northern constellation of the Dragon (Draco), with its eye-catching tail of about 280 thousand light-years long, featuring massive, bright blue star clusters. It is theorised that a more compact intruder galaxy crossed in front of Arp 188 - from right to left in this view - and was slung around behind the Tadpole by their gravitational attraction, with tidal forces drawing out the spiral galaxy's stars, gas, and dust forming the spectacular tail. The intruder galaxy, 300,000 light-years behind the Tadpole, is seen through foreground spiral arms at the upper right.

Sunflowers (Tournesols) is the name of two series of still life paintings by the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh. The first series, executed in Paris in 1887, depicts the flowers lying on the ground, while the second set, executed a year later in Arles, shows a bouquet of sunflowers in a vase. In the artist's mind, both sets were linked by the name of his friend Paul Gauguin, who acquired two of the Paris versions. On March 30, 1987, Japanese insurance magnate, Yasuo Goto, paid the equivalent of US $39,921,750 for van Gogh's Still Life: Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers at auction at Christie's London. The painting currently resides at Seiji Togo Yasuda Memorial Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo.

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