New maps of Saturn's moon Titan revealed giant patches of trace gases glowing at its north and south poles.
The regions were found to be shifted off their poles from the east to the west causing dawn to fall over the northern region and dusk to fall over the south, NASA reported.
"This is an unexpected and potentially groundbreaking discovery," said Martin Cordiner, an astrochemist working at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the lead author of the study. "These kinds of east-to-west variations have never been seen before in Titan's atmospheric gases. Explaining their origin presents us with a fascinating new problem."
The mapping was made using observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), which allowed the research team to look at the chemicals in Titan's with a "snapshot" observation that lasted less than three minutes.
Titan's atmosphere is of particular interest because it acts as a "chemical factory," producing organic, or carbon-based, molecules using the energy of the Sun.
In this study the researchers looked at hydrogen isocyanide (HNC) and cyanoacetylene (HC3N) that forms in Titan's atmosphere. They compared the gases at different levels in Titan's atmosphere and found gas pockets shifted away from the poles at the highest altitudes. The findings are unexpected because winds in Titan's middle atmosphere move in an east-west direction, which should mix up the gases.
"It seems incredible that chemical mechanisms could be operating on rapid enough timescales to cause enhanced 'pockets' in the observed molecules," said Conor Nixon, a planetary scientist at Goddard and a coauthor of the paper, published online today in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. "We would expect the molecules to be quickly mixed around the globe by Titan's winds."
The researchers still do not have an explanation for this phenomenon, but plant to make further observations in the future.
