• The planet Saturn is a gigantic ball of gas on which it would be almost impossible to land, according to our partner The Conversation.

  • One of its moons, Titan, does have soil and an atmosphere… but freezing temperatures!

  • This analysis was conducted by Yaël Nazé, astronomer at the Institute of Astrophysics and Geophysics of the University of Liège (Belgium).

On Earth, the conditions are met for a pleasant life.

There is a floor to settle on.

The average temperature is moderate, neither too hot nor too cold.

An atmosphere is present: it has a favorable composition (with a large part of oxygen, it allows us to breathe) and it is neither too thin (our cells would explode) nor too dense (the air would crush us).

Elsewhere in our solar system, there are two types of planets: small rockies (like Earth) and gas giants.

Saturn, whose size is nine times larger than the Earth, belongs to the second category.

The planet is therefore a gigantic ball of gas.

Huge atmospheric pressure

Problem: you can't "land" on a cloud.

So there's probably a rocky core at the very center of the planet, but you'll be crushed by atmospheric pressure before you get there.

Indeed, on Earth, the air of the atmosphere is above you so weighs a little on you: if you raise your thumb, the top of your finger (about 1 cm2) undergoes a weight equivalent to one kilogram of air.

It sounds like a lot, but in the heart of Saturn, the pressure reaches a hundred million times this value – enough to crush the strongest earthling.

So: impossible to settle there… At best, you could consider living in a space station revolving around the planet.

Why not Titan… but not for the chilly

Titan's surface photographed at an altitude of 10 km by the Huygens space probe © ESA / NASA / JPL / University of Arizona CC0

However, Saturn has dozens of moons, and they do have a “soil”.

The most interesting is undoubtedly Titan because it is the only moon that has a fairly dense atmosphere (its pressure on the ground is one and a half times that of Earth).

But there are still some problems to be able to settle on Titan.

First, it is ten times farther from the Sun than the Earth, it is very cold there: -200°C!

Our “SATURN” file

Then, the atmosphere of Titan is not really like on Earth, it is mainly composed of nitrogen and methane (natural gas) and without oxygen in sufficient quantity for us.

In short, settling there will not be easy either…

Planet

Children's questions: “Why doesn't the Earth burn if its core is hotter than the Sun?

asks Domi (10 years old)

Science

Children's questions: “Why does the earth turn?

asks David (8 years old)

This analysis was written by Yaël Nazé, FNRS astronomer at the Institute of Astrophysics and Geophysics of the University of Liège (Belgium).


The original article was published on The Conversation website.

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