Surface Temperature
Due to its distance from the Sun, Titan is much colder than the Earth. Its surface temperature is about 94 K (−179 °C, or −290 °F). At these temperatures, water ice does not melt, evaporate or sublime, but remains solid.
Because of the extreme cold and also because of lack of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, scientists such as Jonathan Lunine have viewed Titan less as a likely habitat for extraterrestrial life, than as an experiment for examining theories on the conditions that prevailed prior to the appearance of life on Earth. However Lunine does not rule out life in an environment of liquid methane and ethane, and has written about what discovery of such a life form (even if very primitive) would imply about the prevalence of life in the universe.
Read more about this topic: Life On Titan
Famous quotes containing the words surface and/or temperature:
“In Manhattan, every flat surface is a potential stage and every inattentive waiter an unemployed, possibly unemployable, actor.”
—Quentin Crisp (b. 1908)
“This pond never breaks up so soon as the others in this neighborhood, on account both of its greater depth and its having no stream passing through it to melt or wear away the ice.... It indicates better than any water hereabouts the absolute progress of the season, being least affected by transient changes of temperature. A severe cold of a few days’ duration in March may very much retard the opening of the former ponds, while the temperature of Walden increases almost uninterruptedly.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)