
Long way to fill up
Hmm all that Propane.
Never run out of autogas
Better get it before Calor claim it!
Go because my car does.
An American scientist believes he may have come up with an explanation for the curious lakes of liquefied petroleum gas found at the polar regions of Titan, moon of Saturn. It could be because Titan is not spherical, but has a liquid layer which is. A Cassini image of the polar hydrocarbon lakes of Titan The LPG fields of …
"On top of that, its mountaintops are usually lower than the surrounding terrain."
That would make them valleys then wouldn't it?
btw, on earth I understand that PG (LPG before its L) is produced from vegetable (cellulose based) matter under great temperature and pressure over a long period of time. If this is true on Titan, does it mean that it was as warm as earth once? If not where did all that LPG come from?
And does B&Q have enough plastic hose pipe in stock to make a flexible connection, bearing in mind both tenperature and distance changes?
'btw, on earth I understand that PG (LPG before its L) is produced from vegetable (cellulose based) matter under great temperature and pressure over a long period of time.
Yessish.
If this is true on Titan,
No.
does it mean that it was as warm as earth once?
No.
If not where did all that LPG come from?'
Methane seems to be almost universal in the objects of the outer solar system. UV light from the Sun cracks the methane into reactive radicals which then recombine into heavier molecules such as propane, butane and so on. The really heavy hydrocarbons are what make the outer moons of the solar system so dark in colour as well as giving Titan its charming 'smoker's cough' colouration.
Titan's atmosphere is 98.4% nitrogen, 1.6% methane with trace quantities of a few other compounds. There is no oxygen and no strong oxidiser, so your cigarette would not stay alight there, and would not ignite any of the chemicals that would be more exciting in Earth's 20% oxygen atmosphere.
I can understand there being some excitement in extraterrestrial planetary boffin circles over results from Cassini/Huygens but this one seems to have shot his bolt early.
Any liquid on the surface will be subject to the same gravitation and rotation as the rest of the body, same as on Earth, so will not adopt a different shape.
Might be a good idea to send oxygen to Titan. On Earth, strictly speaking, Oxygen is a toxic pollutant produced as a result of early life processes. Greenpeace and FOE, should really be encouraging us to rid the world of this pollutant and return it to the high CO2 atmosphere that it shoul naturally have.
Unfortunately that would not work either - apart from the enormous cost of transporting even a small amount of oxygen to Titan, the problem you really have to consider is the escape velocity of the combustion products, which unfortunately for ethane/propane are comparatively low. This is why they don't use petrol in rockets which are due to fly into space.
A flame, for combustion products.
Well not in our lifetime but thats a handy discovery for some future space faring world.
It CAN be used as fuel, a craft only has to VENT it, not burn it to use as fuel. Equal and opposite action and all that sciency stuff ;)
Do we need titan, before we use it as our solar systems first out space filling station?
PS no one owns it yet - so i publicly declare ownership of titan. If anyone wants to challenge my ownership, come to titan and fight me :)