The only moon in our solar system with its own atmosphere, it will surely grab scientist’s attention. Here, it is providing significant clues to support the nature of Earth’s atmosphere billions of years ago when Earth may have been covered in a blanket of atmospheric haze.
The chemical composition of the haze seen on Saturn’s moon Titan is providing the data of organic material that nourished our planet’s earliest life forms, that would have been a food source for any budding life and it would have been, importantly, a global food source. Therefore, life, instead of being confined to certain very special environments, could have thrived in every puddle.
Scientists previously have concentrated on isolated, extreme environments such as hydrothermal vents bursting with energy and nutrients to understand primordial life. These are probably organic molecules digestible to organisms alive today and could have nourished simple living organisms a long ago. Beyond merely providing a food source for early life forms, this organic haze also may have played a role in providing the very building blocks needed for living organisms to first form.
This haze may have been a dominant feature of Earth’s early atmospheric landscape from about the time of the first evidence of life 3.6 billion years ago until the rise of the oxygen content about 2.3 billion years ago.
The thick haze not only may have nourished organisms, but also may have protected them from harmful ultraviolet rays. The haze may have placed more than 100 million tons of organic material on Earth’s surface annually. From this, we can even guess life forms on the strangest planet’s strangest moon after a couple of billion years later.
Via: msnbc
