The prospect of life in outer space has intrigued many for millennia and even given rise to multiple science disciplines and, as it turns out, there could be some in our own Solar System, as close as Saturn’s largest moon, Titan – but there’s a catch.
As it happens, Titan’s rich organic composition could be suitable for life, but the life forms potentially existing there could be minuscule, according to the recent study conducted by an international team, including researchers from the University of Arizona and Harvard University, shared on April 7.
Indeed, the team, co-led by Antonin Affholder at the UA’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Peter Higgins at Harvard’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, employed bioenergetic modeling to assess the habitability of Titan’s underground ocean.
Is there life on Titan?
Developing a realistic scenario of what life on Titan might look like if it does exist, where it is most likely to appear, and how much of it might be present, they concluded that the moon’s subsurface ocean, approximately 300 miles deep by estimations, could theoretically sustain simple microbial life.
However, this life would comprise no more than a few pounds of the total biomass because of the limited availability and suitability of the Titan’s organic material such lifeforms would consume, according to computer simulations. As Affholder observed:
“Our new study shows that this supply may only be sufficient to sustain a very small population of microbes weighing a total of only a few kilograms at most — equivalent to the mass of a small dog. (…) Such a tiny biosphere would average less than one cell per liter of water over Titan’s entire vast ocean.”
Meanwhile, a possible mission to Titan one day could benefit from aerospace and defense company General Atomics and NASA earlier this year successfully completing a series of high-impact tests of nuclear fuel that spacecraft could use on deep space missions.
ReadNext
