FYI Brighton beach is comprised entirely of pebbles.
So - you thought you knew all about the INSTANT COFFEE DUNES of TITAN?
Shifting the hydrocarbo-ice "sand" dunes of Titan – ice moon of Saturn – takes more effort than had previously been thought, say boffins. Previous ideas on the wind speed required to blow dune-forming particles around the famous satellite were seemingly wrong. Space boffins from the University of Tennessee and Johns Hopkins …
COMMENTS
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Tuesday 9th December 2014 21:43 GMT Martin Gregorie
Re: Lakes of methanol and ethanol
In your dreams. The lakes are methane as the article said and ethane, not ethanol as the article misprinted, plus (much) smaller amounts of assorted higher molecular weight alkanes. These are flammable, or would be if there was any free oxygen in Titan, and definitely not intoxicating.
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Tuesday 9th December 2014 14:29 GMT AbelSoul
Re: may be I have gone blind but I dont see no boffins
It may be you have.
To save you re-reading the whole thing:
Sub heading: Methane moon wind must blow harder - boffins
1st para: takes more effort than previously thought, say boffins.
2nd para: Space boffins from the University of Tennessee
6th para: but boffins think that rather than crushed up shells or grit
Last line: The research was published in hefty boffinry mag Nature
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Wednesday 10th December 2014 21:10 GMT ravenviz
Re: may be I have gone blind but I dont see no boffins
How about Tefal heads instead?
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Tuesday 9th December 2014 13:54 GMT cray74
Re: Ethanol?
" I doubt there is enough free oxygen there for whole lakefuls of alcohol to appear spontaneously, not to say a bit cold for the fermenting yeast..."
http://io9.com/5911365/how-alcohol-is-formed-naturally-in-space
"The Sagittarius B2 cloud has ten billion, billion, billion liters of alcohol floating in it. Most of it is undrinkable, but there are some of them are ethanol, which is drinkable by humans..."
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Tuesday 9th December 2014 18:10 GMT Destroy All Monsters
“This simulation reproduces the fundamental physics governing particle motion thresholds on Titan.”
I love analog computers!
The "sand" on Titan is unlikely to be the same as what we find by the sea in Brighton. What exactly it is made from remains uncertain, but boffins think that rather than crushed up shells or grit...
Dead nanomachines? I'm not saying it is aliens, but...
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Tuesday 9th December 2014 20:29 GMT Anonymous Coward
Blowin' in the wind
"But our atmosphere is a lot thinner than on Titan, where sand molecules have to fight to move against thick nitrogen-rich smog and clouds of methane."
Um, "fight to move?" That would only apply if the thick Titan air were still. Since it's assumed to be moving, the grains would actually have to fight to remain unmoving. Basically the thicker the air, the less wind it takes to move grains, yet the article suggests the opposite.
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Wednesday 10th December 2014 13:31 GMT Robert Helpmann??
There can be only one!
Titan is of particular interest to space experts because it is the only other body in our solar system with liquid on its surface.
That we know of. We have not been able to explore the surface of the gas giants. A cursory glance through Wikipedia shows there is thought to be liquid hydrogen, helium and perhaps other substances present on their perhaps ill-defined surfaces.
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Thursday 11th December 2014 10:10 GMT Dodgy Geezer
Reasons to visit Titan
...“Titan is a strange place indeed,” says co-author Nathan Bridges, rather understatedly...
One day, Titan will almost certainly become a major tourist/holiday destination. Because it has less gravity than the Moon, combined with an atmosphere about 1.5 times as dense as Earth's. So humans could simply strap wings on and flap their hands to fly....