Cosmic rays transformed the deadly gases from Saturn Titan’s moon into organic molecules. This may have happened 2.8 billion years ago on Earth.
The research team of IBM Research-Zurich (Switzerland), the University of Paris-Saclay, the University of Rougen in Mont-Saint-Aignan (France) and the Fritz Harber Institute of the Research System Max Planck (Germany) recreated the ‘cloud particles’ in the atmosphere of the moon Titan – Saturn’s largest satellite, using data collected by NASA spacecraft and observing systems, in particular the Cassini ship around Saturn.
The results published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters show that Titan mist is made up of nanoparticles made up of many large, complex organic particles containing carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen. These molecules form in a chemical chain reaction when cosmic radiation hits a mixture of methane, nitrogen, and other gases in Titan’s atmosphere.
What’s so special is that our studies on the Earth itself show that the Earth’s atmosphere from 2.8 billion years ago could be the same. This period belonged to the Mesoarchean era, when cyanobacteria appeared, constantly photosynthesizing, creating the first subterranean biosphere, and slowly converting carbon dioxide in the early toxic atmosphere into oxygen, paving the way for birth and death. the reproduction of another form of life.
This decades-long research attempted to create tholins, a Greek term for “ambiguous,” used to refer to a wide range of unnamed, but unnamed, carbon-containing organic compounds when atmospheric components are exposed to ultraviolet or cosmic rays. They were successful, and the process of analyzing over 100 molecules that make up Titan’s tholins came to the above conclusions.
According to Science Alert, this reinforces the theory that the Titan moon evolves like the Earth billions of years ago, which NASA had proposed. Their spacecraft knew that this planet had the same terrain as Earth, only that its rivers and lakes did not contain water but liquid methane. However, a number of other paleontological and geological studies show that the Earth a few billion years ago was also changed by the first batch of monstrous creatures, transformed into the world it is today.
