Sunset on Saturn’s moon Titan reveals the atmosphere around the moon as seen from the night side with NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI
Source: [astrobio.net]
With more than a thousand confirmed planets outside of our solar system, astronomers are attempting to identify the atmospheres of these distant bodies to determine if they could possibly host life.
Yet, viewing a body so far away remains a challenge. Astronomers are honing their technique in exoplanet observation with an object we know much more about in our own solar system — Saturn’s moon, Titan. The process should help scientists better understand what a signal from a hazy planet that is similar to Titan would look like.
The study, “Titan solar occultation observations reveal transit spectra of a hazy world” was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences under lead author Tyler Robinson of the NASA Ames Research Center and member of the NASA Astrobiology Institute’s Virtual Planetary Laboratory team at the University of Washington.