If other planets orbited Earth & Earth w/ Saturn's rings

Scale from Brad Goodspeed on Vimeo.

Saturn Storm

All the other planets in our solar system nearly aligned perfectly this morning

I was out looking at the stars this morning and I noticed that currently (and for the next few weeks I guess) Jupiter is the brightest celestial object in the sky, after the moon and sun, of course. So, I came in and opened my favorite planetarium program, Stellarium, to see what else was out there, and I noticed that every planet in the solar system, plus the moon and sun were as close to perfect alignment as I've ever seen. Even some of the other objects in our solar system past Pluto were aligned (of course, Pluto was the planet farthest from alignment.) I took some screen shots:

In this image, you can see (from l to r): the Moon, Saturn, Mars, Vesta (one of those objects past Pluto), Venus, Mercury, the Sun, and Juno (another object past Pluto, quite a bit off, but in the picture). Click the image to make it larger. The planetary orbits are the red lines. I'm zoomed quite a bit out to see the big picture.

And in this image, (l to r) you can see the Sun, Jupiter and Uranus right together, Neptune, and then there's Pluto off kilter to the far right. Click the image to make it larger. In this image, I'm zoomed about the same distance but with a wider field of vision to fit the Sun in the same image with this grouping of planets.

Anyway, it was something which doesn't happen very often that I thought was cool and I wanted to share. Since they aren't perfectly aligned, I guess that's why nothing has really been written about this--that I have seen. But that's pretty dang close to perfect alignment, if you ask me!

Titan's atmosphere oddity consistent with methane-based life

By John Timmer Ars Technica

Something strange is afoot in the atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan, according to data sent back from the Cassini mission. Data returned from a spectrometer on Cassini indicates that there's a large flux of hydrogen in the moon's atmosphere, with the gas forming in the upper atmosphere and being removed from the atmosphere at Titan's surface. We don't currently know what process is ensuring its removal, but the amounts of hydrogen being taken out of the atmosphere are consistent with an earlier proposal of methane-based life.

Titan's atmosphere is rich in hydrocarbon compounds, and chemical changes in the upper atmosphere are driven by the arrival of ultraviolet light from the sun. One of the expected results of the UV exposure is the liberation of molecular hydrogen from methane via a process that produces more complex hydrocarbons. With little oxygen to react with, the molecular hydrogen should remain stable. Some of it will escape into space, but a new paper indicates that a substantial amount of that hydrogen migrates down through the atmosphere towards Titan's surface.

Since it's not accumulating there, some chemical process must be removing it from the atmosphere; right now, we don't know what that process is, and, as NASA's own news piece on the topic notes, the first option for scientists is to consider simple chemistry.

However, the abstract of the paper notes that this level of hydrogen consumption is consistent with an earlier prediction of methanogenic life. In short, the life would get its energy by "burning" the hydrogen with a carbon source instead of oxygen, releasing methane (CH₄) in the process. The source of the carbon is where a second paper (not yet online) comes in. Models of Titan's upper atmosphere suggest that significant amounts of acetylene should be produced by the reactions there, and this would provide an excellent source of carbon to any hypothetical metabolisms. The surprise of the second paper is that there's very little acetylene to be found on Titan's surface.

Two chemical enigmas certainly don't constitute life, and the authors of the latter paper provide a variety of ways to account for the acetylene shortage that don't involve an organism. It's also important to remember that there won't be anything resembling liquid water on the surface of Titan, so anything alive there would have to be living in a methane/ethane soup (not to mention at temperatures nearing -200°C).

Scientists are a cautious bunch, and it's likely that these results will remain in limbo for a while. The discovery of plumes of methane in the atmosphere of Mars was another chemical enigma that might be evidence for life. It's been about a year and a half since their announcement and nobody has come up with a satisfying explanation for their presence (at least as far as I'm aware), but the scientific community is nowhere close to ready to call that conclusive evidence for life.