Nasa Cassini Image: Surface of Titan Sea, Ligeia Mare, is mirror smooth

This false-colour image of the surface of Titan was made using radar measurements made by NASA's Cassini spacecraft. 

The spacecraft revealed that the surface of Ligeia Mare, Titan's second largest lake, is unusually still, most likely due to a lack of winds at the time of observation. 

Credit: Howard Zebker 

New radar measurements of an enormous sea on Titan offer insights into the weather patterns and landscape composition of the Saturn moon. 

The measurements, made in 2013 by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, reveal that the surface of Ligeia Mare, Titan's second largest sea, possesses a mirror-like smoothness, possibly due to a lack of winds.

"If you could look out on this sea, it would be really still. It would just be a totally glassy surface," said Howard Zebker, professor of geophysics and of electrical engineering at Stanford who is the lead author of a new study detailing the research.

Howard Zebker

The findings, recently published online in Geophysical Research Letters, also indicate that the solid terrain surrounding the sea is likely made of solid organic materials and not frozen water.

Saturn's second largest moon, Titan has a dense, planet-like atmosphere and large seas made of methane and ethane.

Measuring roughly 260 miles (420 km) by 217 miles (350 km), Ligeia Mare is larger than Lake Superior on Earth.

"Titan is the best analog that we have in the solar system to a body like the Earth because it is the only other body that we know of that has a complex cycle of solid, liquid, and gas constituents," Zebker said.

Titan's thick cloud cover makes it difficult for Cassini to obtain clear optical images of its surface, so scientists must rely on radar, which can see through the clouds, instead of a camera.

To paint a radar picture of Ligeia Mare, Cassini bounced radio waves off the sea's surface and then analyzed the echo.

The strength of the reflected signal indicated how much wave action was happening on the sea. To understand why, Zebker said, imagine sunlight reflecting off of a lake on Earth.

"If the lake were really flat, it would act as a perfect mirror and you would have an extremely bright image of the sun," he said.

"But if you ruffle up the surface of the sea, the light gets scattered in a lot of directions, and the reflection would be much dimmer. We did the same thing with radar on Titan."

The radar measurements suggest the surface of Ligeia Mare is eerily still. "Cassini's radar sensitivity in this experiment is one millimeter, so that means if there are waves on Ligeia Mare, they're smaller than one millimeter. That's really, really smooth," Zebker said.

One possible explanation for the sea's calmness is that no winds happened to be blowing across that region of the moon when Cassini made its flyby.

Another possibility is that a thin layer of some material is suppressing wave action. "For example, on Earth, if you put oil on top of a sea, you suppress a lot of small waves," Zebker said.

Cassini also measured microwave radiation emitted by the materials that make up Titan's surface.

By analyzing those measurements, and accounting for factors such as temperature and pressure, Zebker's team confirmed previous findings that the terrain around Ligeia Mare is composed of solid organic material, likely the same methane and ethane that make up the sea.

"Like water on Earth, methane on Titan can exists as a solid, a liquid, and a gas all at once," Zebker said.

Titan's similarities to Earth make it a good model for our own planet's early evolution, Zebker said. "Titan is different in the details from Earth, but because there is global circulation happening, the big picture is the same," he added.

"Seeing something in two very different environments could help reveal the overall guiding principles for the evolution of planetary bodies, and help explain why Earth developed life and Titan didn't."

More Information: "Surface of Ligeia Mare, Titan, from Cassini altimeter and radiometer analysis" H.Zebler et al.: 30 JAN 2014 - DOI: 10.1002/2013GL058877

New paper reviews research on the grain of space-time

Smooth" or grainy? Is space-time continuous or is it made up of very fine (10-35 metres on the "Planck scale") but discrete grains, if we look at it very close up ?

If the latter were true, scientists think, this would lead to deviations from the theory of special relativity formulated by Albert Einstein more than 100 years ago.

In some theoretical scenarios, the "non-continuity" of space-time implies violations to the invariance of the physical laws under the so-called Lorentz transformations (which establish that physical laws are the same for all inertial reference frames that are at the basis of special relativity).

Since the 90s physicists have devised several methods (often based on phenomena connected to high-energy astrophysics) to test these deviations from standard physics.

Stefano Liberati

Stefano Liberati, coordinator of the Astroparticle Physics group of the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) of Trieste, recently published a systematic review to present the state of the art in this field and the constraints that can be placed on the various models that predict violations to Special Relativity.

The paper is an invited Topic Review published in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity.

This journal periodically asks leading world experts to "sum up" what is known in a specific field of study.

The review has now been selected as one of the journal's Highlight papers for 2013.

"Physicists have been wondering about the nature of space-time for years. We've been asking ourselves whether it is continuous at all scales, as we perceive it in our daily experience, or whether at very small sizes it presents an irregular grain that we, in our direct experience, are unable to perceive", explains Liberati.

"Imagine looking at a slab of marble from some distance: it will probably seem to have a uniform texture.

However, on closer inspection, for example using a powerful microscope, you can see that the marble is porous and irregular".

"In a certain sense physicists have been trying to do something similar with space-time: to find something that acts as a microscope to find out whether at very small length scales there is indeed some irregularity.

In my paper I presented a systematic overview of the experiments and observations that can be exploited to investigate the existence of these irregularities.

Special relativity is one of the cornerstones of modern physics and as such it is very important to test its validity, insofar as current observations allow us".

More information: 'Tests of Lorentz invariance: a 2013 update' S Liberati 2013 Class. Quantum Grav. 30 133001 doi:10.1088/0264-9381/30/13/133001