Why Didn’t Saturn Eat Titan, Its Biggest Moon?

New simulations explain how the ringed planet ended up with one giant moon that domineers its tinier siblings. In classical mythology, the titan Cronus, who was reinterpreted by the Romans as Saturn, devoured his newborn children to prevent a prophesied coup. (He did not succeed, and Zeus became the king of the gods. ) In planetary science, a similar scenario emerges when scientists recreate the evolution of large planets like Saturn, which has a satellite system dominated by one massive moon, Titan.

Typically those simulated planets either eat their orbital retinue, or multiple sizable moons survive into adulthood, like the four Galilean moons of Jupiter. How, then, did Saturn end up with massive Titan and a multitude of tinier moons? Using a set of simulations detailed Monday in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, a team of planetary scientists identified an explanation for how a moon like Titan could have avoided straying too close to its murderous parent. “Titan is one of the largest moons in our solar system,” said Yuri Fujii of Nagoya University and lead author of the new study.

“I would like to reveal its origin. ” Large planets, in their infancy, are swaddled by a swirling disk of gas and dust. Usually, most of their moons, if there are any, form in tandem with the planet from that disk. Some may be small and icy, while others might end up like Titan, the second-largest moon in our solar system.

Bigger than the planet Mercury, Titan is a hulking mass with liquid hydrocarbon seas and a thick froth of nitrogen atmosphere. But when scientists try to simulate how these moons grew and evolved, they end up with satellite systems that don’t replicate reality. Dr.

“Fujii said that these simulations oversimplify how moons move and how those gassy, circumplanetary disks behave.”

She and a colleague attempted a more detailed simulation of moon formation for a planet at Saturn’s distance from the sun. Instead of considering a large world surrounded by a simplified, gassy disk, she modeled an environment with more intricate, fine-scaled temperatures and densities. Then, she tweaked the amount of turbulence in the gas itself. They then simulated more than 100,000 years of moon evolution, adding in the gravitational jostling caused by migrating satellites and accounting for the disk’s dissipation over time.