remember that JWST doesn’t do visible spectrum and, regardless, it’s specialized for faint distant objects. From JWST’s perspective, Titan emits a lot of light. It’s kind of like using a telephoto lens to take a picture of your foot.
Knowing it’s just color shifted makes me wonder if that white band in the upper right that looks like a reflection off the atmosphere is actually a reflection off the atmosphere. And also what method of color shifting was used. Are the colors representative of anything or did they just pick what made for the best photo?
People who instantly believe every thought that occurs to them aren’t conspiracy theorists per se, but there’s not a lot of cleavage in that Venn diagram.
Isn’t that an actual scientific theory about it? That it could have an ocean of liquid water under the surface of ice? Maybe I’m thinking of a different moon…
That’s Europa. The thinking is that Europa may have life in its oceans beneath the ice that feed off of geothermal vents and therefore don’t require any sunlight.
People saying this is blurry… have you considered: every other image is stitched, edited, overlaid and colorized, whereas this is a picture that’s actually quite close to that from the camera of JWST.
JWST doesn’t see visible light, so it’s blurry and false color.
But JWST also wasn’t designed to take pictures of moons in our solar system, it was designed to take picture of the cosmic background and find stars with planets around them.
This is like trying to use a telescope to look at your globe across the living room, it’s going to be blurry because it wasn’t designed for that.
Image from 2022 using infrared imaging with the goal of spotting clouds on Titan. The white spot that looks like a bubble reflection on the upper right of the image (1 o’clock?) is a cloud.
This is not true color, but colors assigned to different the wavelengths that we otherwise cannot see. Visible light would not have allowed imaging deep enough into the atmosphere to see clouds.
Titan is the only object other than Earth where liquid hydrocarbon lakes and seas have actually been found (by Cassini) in its polar regions – in abundance in the north polar region and at least one of approximately 20,000 km2, called Ontario Lacus, on its south pole. Just recently, there have also been long-standing methane lakes, or puddles, in Titan’s “tropics” discovered.
With its liquids (both surface and subsurface) and robust nitrogen atmosphere, Titan’s methane cycle bears a striking similarity to Earth’s water cycle, albeit at the much lower temperature of about 94 K (−179 °C; −290 °F).
This makes me wonder what would happen if someone ignited large explosives by some of these hydrocarbon pools… since there’s plenty of water ice, there’s oxygen tied up to react with…
Titan is small, and distant, when compared to the photo in the thread.
The photo in this thread is by Cassini, which was at least a thousand of times closer. Titan is 1.2 million KM from Saturn, which Cassini was orbiting, while Earth, which JWST “orbits” is at least 1.2 billion KM from Saturn.
Very blurry for a powerful telescope. Wonder if it’s because moon is moving fast relative to close telescope so the effective shutter speed needs to be relatively high?
JWST primarily looks at very large objects that are far away. Titan (and really everything in the solar system) is relatively close to us, but are tiny in comparison to galaxies/nebulae, so their actual size as they appear in the sky is a lot smaller.
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