Oh my! Looks like Saturn's largest moon, Titan, just had a Marilyn Monroe moment!
NASA's Cassini probe caught Titan in the nude, according to a press release from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Titan is large enough to be considered a planet if it orbited the Sun and not Saturn. Titan also appears to act like Venus, Mars or a comet when faced with the unrefined power of the solar wind.
"We observed that Titan interacts with the solar wind very much like Mars, if you moved it to the distance of Saturn," said research lead Cesar Bertucci of the Institute of Astronomy and Space Physics in Buenos Aires. "We thought Titan in this state would look different. We certainly were surprised."
Saturn's magnetosphere ensnares Titan 95 percent of the time, according to JPL. Scientists got lucky during the Cassini flyby on Dec. 1, 2013 when the moon was on the sun-side of Saturn and was blasted by a solar outburst. "The strong surge in the solar wind so compressed the Sun-facing side of Saturn's magnetosphere that the bubble's outer edge was pushed inside the orbit of Titan," according to JPL. "This left the moon exposed to, and unprotected from, the raging stream of energetic solar particles."
Earth's magnetic field protects us from solar winds, but Venus, Mars and comets are unprotected, according to JPL - and so was Titan at that moment.
The naked giant moon has given new ideas to scientists studying solar winds. "This could mean we can use the same tools to study how vastly different worlds, in different parts of the solar system, interact with the wind from the Sun," Bertucci said, according to the press release.
Bertucci thinks there is a chance that Pluto - which will be visited for the first time by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft - will also be an unmagnetized body.
"After nearly a decade in orbit, the Cassini mission has revealed once again that the Saturn system is full of surprises," said Michele Dougherty, principal investigator of the Cassini magnetometer at Imperial College, London. "After more than a hundred flybys, we have finally encountered Titan out in the solar wind, which will allow us to better understand how such moons maintain or lose their atmospheres."
