Saturn's Brood: Beyond the Outer Ring

the way down. But then something happened. It was as if a hand of a silent god reached out from the darkness of space and just plucked us gently from the depths of the gas giant's gravity well lifted us up up to freedom. We still don't know what happened. Our navigational computers have no explanation, but our orbit ceased its decay, and with the slow gradual acceleration, driven from some source totally foreign to the ship itself, we were

on our way, but not on our way home. Something out there, some unknown force, is urging us in the other direction. Despite the long journey, our ever dwindling share of sunlight, and the powerful radiation bath, we just endured. The plants that once struggled for life in our forest dome are now unexpectedly thriving, as if more of the Solar System's great moons want to be seen, want to

be understood, and some hidden intelligence is helping them. And now the cold golden wheel of Saturn looms in the foreground, with its major moons appearing as tiny points of light in the darkness, growing ever closer as our spiral begins again. Hey, welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and my name is Joe McCormick, and backed by popular demand, we are now going to explore the

moons of Saturn. So this will be, I guess, a sequel of sorts to the episode we did a while back about the moons of Jupiter, or the major moons of Jupiter. In both cases, these are large gas giants. They have lots of moons, so we have to uh, I would say pick our battles, but they're not battles, their missions of peace and exploration, that's right. Yeah. In the case of Saturn here there are currently fifty three known moons, nine currently awaiting confirmation, so that's a lot

of moons. But we're gonna, indeed going to stick to just the the the key items of interest here, the ones indeed that you've likely heard of in science fiction, that you've certainly heard of, uh in science journalism. So yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna. We've picked up some good destinations here for our trip. So Robert, Saturn is a kind of different beasts than Jupiter, isn't it. Yeah, I mean

it's easy to lump them together. They're the two biggest objects in our solar system, the biggest objects to enormous gas giants, easily the two jazziest planets as well. Like my my son who's four, I haven't really been pushing the space agenda as much as I have like the Earth sciences agenda, but even he instantly knows Saturn and he knows Jupiter well. Saturn, I would say, is the

iconic image of a planet. Now, if you go to if you're looking for clip art or vector images or something like that of images of planets, you're going to see Saturn because Saturn you can recognize it's got the rings. It's the planet that's not just different in terms of coloring and uh and what you might see about its atmosphere or lack thereof, or cratering and stuff like that.

Its whole profile is different. It's like a different animal altogether. Yeah, and it's it's kind of the pin up model of the Solar System. It is the one that you see the most, just really gleaming lt just crisp images. And if you have just a row of globes, a row of circles, the presence of Saturn, perhaps more so than any of the others, is going to queue you in. Oh, I'm looking at a model of the Solar System. Oh right. Yeah, it's the difference between a bunch of balls and planets.

But it's also different than Jupiter in that Jupiter was this very intense experience. Now Saturn also is very large, it has a deep gravity. Well you know, it's got those same things going for it. But Saturn, i would say, is a more peaceful and colder thing to experience, unlike the intense radiation bath of Jupiter. Yeah, it's a little

more serene. Those we'll discuss here. It itself is a very hostile world, and its moons are pretty hostile as well, at least to beings like at least two, you know, weak fragile beings like us. We can scarcely survive outside

of a slim portion of our own planets environment. Reading reading up for this episode, I was astonished to discover how excited scientists are about the possibility for life and a couple of Saturn's moons, Because when you think about life in our Solar System beyond Earth, everybody always mentions Europa. That that's the one that comes to mind, and for good reason. There's a lot of reason to want to

study Europa from an astrobiological perspective. But Saturn has some really good moons going for it, and we're gonna explore what's going on on those moons today, all right. Before we get into that, though, let's let's just roll through some of the basics about Saturn just to give everyone a grounding in the planet that plays host all of these wonderful spheres and and ovals in a case of alf just lumps of rock uh and the potatoes spongey potato.

So again, it's the second largest plane in our Solar system. It's a gas giant without solid substance save it's dense, hot, pressurized core of rock, ice, water and other compounds. And all of this is an enveloped by liquid metallic hid

gen inside a layer of a liquid hydrogen. Okay, so it's located nine point five astronomical units away from the Sun, six planet in our solar system, as the posters tell us, and has seven icy rings that encircle it, spanning up to one and seventy five thousand miles or two two thoud kilometers. So what are the rings consist of? Yeah? I've always wondered this. Yeah, the contrary to what bugs Bunny you may have taught you, if if I remember correctly, they are not the solid rings that you can run

around on. They're not like a treadmill or anything. But scientists haven't always known that that's true. They have not always been aware of that. We know now that it's it's mostly water ice. The planet's ring system extends hundreds of thousands of kilometers out from the planet, but the vertical height is typically about ten meters or thirty feet in the wine rings. Are you serious? But but but but there's there's there's a key butt coming up. They

can grow far larger. During Saturn's autumn two thousand nine equinox, the Casine Any spacecraft images showed us that vertical formations and some of the rings had piled the particles up, but in ridges more than three kilometers or two miles tall. And there's some fascinating structures and behaviors that you can see within the rings to including these like a propeller

shaped objects you can form. It's crazy now. Light Jupiter Saturn is made mostly of hydrogen and helium, and in the upper atmosphere, wind speeds can reach five hundred meters or sixteen hundred feet per second in the equatorial region. These winds fast. It's pretty fast, so it looks more peaceful than it is. Just because it doesn't have the big red spot doesn't mean it has some some anger to it. Uh. These winds combined with heat rising from the planet's in tier cause the yellow gold bands that

we see visible in the atmosphere. But they're not as visible as the bands we see on Jupiter. Right, Yeah, it's not. It's not as angry. It's not. It doesn't look like somebody just poured a bunch of like red liquid into you know, a swirling mixer bowl of pancake batter in blood. That is a great way to describe it.

That's how I think of Jupitery. Yeah, this one is more just like pancake batter with some with some honey at you know, there's a wonderful coincidence with the other episode that we recorded this week, Robert, which was the episode on the Library of Babel. And now I'm not sure what the publishing schedule is going to be, but in the episode on the in the Library of Babble, we discussed how people in the Library of Babel seek out the Crimson hexagon. That's right, and indeed there is

a hexagon on Saturn. It's it does not contain any books. It is not a room per se. Well you don't know that, I'm pretty sure, but yes, if you look at you I'm sure a number of people have seen seen images of this here. But if you if you look at various images of Saturn, there appears to be a hexagon at the top, almost as if it has a little hexagonal hat, a little skull cap on um. And it's weird to look at because you're seeing this in nature. This is not obviously an object designed by

anybody on purpose. But it's not circular. It's got these clear corners. Yeah, it's not the kind of shape that you would necessarily expect. But there is, of course a very natural reason for this. This is caused by jet streams uh in the in the wind systems of Saturn. Basically, you have a region here that's bound on each side

by different editing editing storms. So it's uh, it's the kind of thing if you've ever met somebody who's playing with a lot of bubbles, you know, like doing a lot of bubble art, and not sure what you mean bubble, like blowing bubbles and sticking other bubbles, maybe blowing smoke into those bubbles. Okay, I'm not very familiar with this art form. Oh you're not. Oh it was Big Medicine on like Sesame Street and and um Mr Rogers neighborhood and back in the day, I completely lost touch with

my inner child. Well, blowing big bubbles is a lot of fun, but blowing small bubbles too, because you can join them together, and if you really know what you're doing, you can form geometric shapes at the center where these bubbles bubbles border other bubbles and kind of force different shapes towards the center. Oh yeah, okay, I think I know what you're talking about. So I try to think of that when I think of this particular scenario to try and remind myself that yes, uh, non spherical shapes

are possible within nature given the right circumstances. Now, another quick fact about Saturn. Here a day last ten hours and a year. The time it takes through the body to orbit its central star last twenty nine earth years, and the planet's a magnetic field is smaller than Jupiter's, but still five seventy eight times as powerful as Earth's,

shielding Saturn and many of its moons from the solar wind. Okay, well that's going to be important if we're talking about I don't know, putting a colony there, yea very important. So on that note, let's start talking about the discovery of Saturn, the discovery of Saturn's moons. Saturn, of course, is a very We've known about Saturn for a very long time. Right, nobody knows who discovered sat turned because the ancients knew about Saturn. We've known about Saturn as

long as we've had history. You know, naked eye astronomers could peer up into the night sky and see Saturn. So uh so, what we're really going to be talking about is the first telescopic studies of Saturn. And you might recall from the last episode that the person usually credited with discovering the largest moons of Jupiter, the four Galilean Moons, was the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, and Galileos also given credit for discovering the rings of Saturn, though

he didn't really understand what he was looking at. Now, like we said, everybody already knew about Saturn, but they knew it as a point of light in the sky. And when Galileo looked at Saturn, he saw something very odd, a triple star. It looked like one enormous star with two tiny stars attached to it on either side, like

little side cars riding along with it. Now fun fact, Galileo wanted to get credit for being the first person to discover this triple star, but he wasn't ready to publish his findings yet, so he used a method that I thought was pretty clever. He instead disseminated an anagram. And by the way, when this came up, I had to look up anagrams of our names for fun. I have no good ones, not really. My name is I've

got comic Jock rim and that's got it. But Robert, You've got some awesome anagrams in case you've never looked him up before. You've got Mr babel rot that's pretty good. You've also got barrel tomb, barrel to m okay. But anyway, uh So, anagram jumbled around letters, you know, jumbled up, and then you can you can und jumble them to spell the original message and show if it's a sufficiently short number of letters, you know, you can show that you had this idea all along, and that that was

Galileo's idea. So the anagram that Galileo spread around could be unjumbled to read something along the lines of I've discovered the triform planet, and if anybody tried to scoop him, he could just unscrambled it and show that he had seen it first. But we now know that Saturn is not a triform planet. So who figured that out? Well?

In sixteen fifty five. Around sixteen fifty six, the Dutch astronomer, mathematician, and all around science guy Christian Hygans made a study of Saturn through a more powerful telescope, and he made his own discoveries so by observing how the side stars of Saturn could disappear and then reappear. And this is something other observers had noticed too. Hygans realized that he was actually looking at a planet surrounded by a flat

disc of rings. It could disappear because of what you mentioned about how flat it is, right, so it could be very bright when we're looking at it at an angle where the rings are reflecting up toward us. But when the rings suddenly turned to where they're pretty much perpendicular with our view, they completely disappear. There's not enough surface to reflect anything. It's like a It's like a

lady in a hat with a wide brim. Depending on how she is hold in her head, the positioning of her neck, you may or may not see the brim of the hat, and you'll see at a very degree y. So she tilts her head towards you, you see the brim, she tilts her head flat relative to your perspective, you don't really see much. And so Hyggan's observed that. But

Hygan's didn't know what the rings were made of. I think he actually thought they might be some kind of solid structure, maybe more like the bugs money example, And just try to imagine that in reality. Again. I love thinking about like when you had less information and and we just we're trying to conceive of what the universe was like solid rings around the planet. Yeah, I mean they based on the information available at the time. Yeah,

why not fascinating. But of course subsequently we learned more about the rings of Saturn. Now, of course, Hygan's discovered something else while studying Saturn, a moon. Nobody had seen any of the moons of Saturn up until this time, and he discovered the largest moon of Saturn, which is Titan, which is going to be a fascinating thing to explore in the little little bit here. But then subsequently other moons of Saturn were discovered by astronomers like Giovanni Cassini

and William Herschel. And we're still learning more about Saturn's smaller satellites. Today, we don't know everything there is to know about Saturn's moons and especially it's smallest moons. Yeah. Again, like I mentioned earlier, fifty three known moons, nine currently awaiting confirmation, so we're still figuring it all out. Now.

We have actually sent exploration missions to Saturn. So there were several fly bys Pioneer eleven, Voyager one, and two that they did fly bys of Saturn, did a little bit of observation, but the big one, the real hero for for planetary science and discovery and the Saturn sphere

is Cassini, the Cassini Hoygien's mission. So the Cassini orbiter entered Saturn's orbit in two thousand four during Saturn's northern winter, and it's been conducting research on Saturn and its moons ever since, and it has sent back some awesome photos. One of the coolest thing about the Seni photos I've always thought is how real photos that are taken by Cassini. Now, of course they're usually like color enhanced or enhanced in some way, but real photos taken by this probe look

like illustrations. They often they just don't look like a picture that somebody took with a real camera. But they are with of course some enhancements. I don't know. I love that. I love it when reality can't pass for real. Yeah, because the thing that you're photographing is so utterly unreal. Yeah, to our earthling conceptions, to everything that we have evolved

a view here on this world. Yeah. And of course, another part of the Cassini mission was the Huygens probe, which went down landed on Titan in two thousand five after Cassini reached Saturn in two thousand four, and that also sent back some amazing imagery and made some fascinating discoveries that we will talk about in a bit when it's time to speak of Titan. So now it's time to take a quick break. But when we come back, we will be spiraling in towards Saturn, beginning with the

outermost moons and working our way in. All right, we're back, Robert. It it seems like we're coming up on a on a strange outer moon. Yes, we in fact, we're coming up on the largest of the outer moons. Iapus APUs, Yes, it didn't that sound Lovecraft. I in like something they would worship. A chanted name appatus. You just want to invoke it. Yeah, named, by the way for a Tartarus bound Titan. So it's nice and it has a nice

gloomy feel to it. Ioppotus is not unlike the yenyang of Chinese philosophy, to to prepare everyone for what you're gonna see here. Uh, it's leading hemisphere is dark while it's trailing himisphere is significantly brighter. It's a tidally locked world like a number of moons, meaning that one side always faces Saturn and the other side always faces the void. It essentially looks like the en Yang. It essentially looks like the black and white cookie from that episode of Seinfeld.

It's like the two face of Saturn's moons, and it's it's crazy to behold, and it's been crazy for scientists to try and figure out exactly why this is getting too shortly. Mentioning two face, It's it's monstrous in more than one way in appearance. Yeah, that's right. It also has an equatorial ridge, which is a chain of six mile or ten kilometer high mountains, and this is wonderful. It it might have formed during a high speed rotation period or most exciting at all of all, it might

be a collapsed ring. No, you're making that up. No, that's one of the theories, collapsed ring. Yeah. These are essentially like the collapsed ring mountains, which sounds like a perfect It sounds like something out of a Jack Vance novel, you know. So it could have had a ring that was drawn into the planet by gravity, collapse into it and became this planet wide ridge of mountains that looks like a horror movie monster backbones sticking up out of

the planet's flesh. It's crazy, a killer now it it orbits at a little over two million miles or three million kilometers away from Saturn, and it has probably and this has probably protected it from tidal forces and melting episodes that would have resurfaced it. So it's far enough away from Saturn that that Saturn's gravity is not warping it too much. It's not heating it and causing the

geological activity exactly. But you do have the strange dark and white side, and um there have been three major theories over the years as to why one side is black and the other is white. Hit me all right. So one theory is that i Appetus maybe sweeping up particles from the more distant dark moon phobe and steadily renewing this dusting to cover up all but the newest craters. Okay, it's one sability. Another one is that I saw volcanism

may be distributing the dark materials. We're talking of volcano like eruptions of hydrocarbons, perhaps to due to chemical reactions that are in turn caused by solar radiation. So you've got a planet that's half covered in soot sort of. Yeah. Now the third theory then, this is the one that's that is backed up by a lot of data from two thousand seven's uh Cassini fly by, and that is that thermal segregation is going on. So what is that? So, yeah,

the salad works. It takes the Moon as long as seventy nine days to rotate around Saturn, and it's some dark material made its way to the Moon at some point in the past, perhaps dude tying into one and to the first theory, Um, then the long periods of solar exposure on the dark side would have caused the dark material to heat up and volatile icy materials within the dark to sublime out and retreat to colder regions. The bright regions become brighter and the dark regions get darker. Okay,

so sort of a slow attrition. Yeah, okay. So Yeapitus is a fairly small world, right, it's about one seven the mass of Pluto, about the width of Earth's moon. But what is the life potential? I want to know. That's our main question with all these right, Yeah, yeah, that's certainly that's the one thing we want to know on each of these, is it possible that there's some

sort of life clinging to this little moon. Now we know that the planet itself is probably alive, and it's a curled up movie monster that's going to unfurled with its backbone finally sinking in as it stretches its back out and raises its claws. But assuming that's not the case, and it's just a rock in space, what we Yeah, what's the hope that there's life on it? A very very little, very little hope for life here. Despite the insistence by various UFO groups that there are domed cities

or other such constructions here. But well, if you look closely enough and you want it enough, you can find dumb cities and just about any world. Ain't that always the case? Uh? Could we put a colony there though, if it were entirely self contained and we had the you know, the necessary technology, of course, possibly, But you get down to the fact that there are worse and better places to consider in the neighborhood. But it wouldn't be like trying to put a colony on Io or something.

No items like you could do it, but they're better places Interestingly enough, this world is the location of the monolith in the original novel two thousand one of Space Odyssey. Oh so not wait, hold on the modelith the monolith on Earth's moon or the monolith on Jupiter in orbit around Jupiter. Right in the movie that it's in orbit around Jupiter, but in the book it was Saturn. But in making two dozen one Space odyestly they couldn't get the models to look right for Saturn's rings, so they

changed it to Jupiter. Yeah, that's interesting. I didn't know that. Uh, it's interesting to look at the the media, the fictional attention that had has gone to Saturn versus Jupiter, and I feel like Saturn is often it's almost like Saturn is the heaven of our science fiction dreams of our future Solar system, and Jupiter is more the hell Jupiter, or at least the limbo. Yeah, like Jupiters, where you have the Jovian moons. That's where you put weird bases

and weird weird colonies and mining colonies and maybe prisons. Saturn, for the most part, it seems like there's a lot of dreamy or stuff going on there. Yeah, maybe that's just me that's my my read on some of the examples I was looking at. No, it is dreamy. You're exactly right. I mean we mentioned that earlier. It's the Saturn imagery throughout popular culture and art and everything. It's very serene, very dreamy, very pretty, kind of quiet silver

light in the background of space. Now we're gonna do a quick fly by of the next moon because it doesn't seem like there's a whole lot to see there, but it is worth pointing out as a strange landmark in the sphere of Saturn, and that's the moon Hyperion. Yes, Hyperion, despite its wonderful name, despite whatever whatever you might expect of it, based on Dan Simon's Wonderful Hyperion books, which would, by the way, do not take place on this Hyperion.

I think it's alluded that a distant exoplanet named Hyperion is colonized by individuals who are originally somehow tied to Hyperion in our Solar system, but totally different things. Because Hyperion in our Solar System, as it orbits around Saturn, is essentially a giant potato. Yeah, it's an irregular shaped and it's very small, about a one point one times the mass of Earth's atmosphere, not Earth, but the gas in the atmosphere, about ten percent the width of Earth's moon.

It's not very big, and it's shaped very strangely, like a like a spongy low density sweet potato. Yeah. I've seen it described as a large frozen double pile. Uh. It's it's the largest of Saturn's irregular, non spherical moons, and it's probably the remnant of a larger moon that was destroyed by a major impact. So this is just a junk, man, this is a rubble moon. We're not gonna land there. There's certainly nothing, no life to consider here, but it's kind of worth the point out as we

continue our journey towards a far more interesting um planetary object. Yeah. Do you hear that sound? I think we're I think we're coming in. Now, what is that sound? It's signaling the Titans there. So Titan Titan is about the mass of Mercury, about one point eight times the mass of Earth's moon, about a hundred and fifty percent of the

width of the moon, the Earth's moon. Uh, it's spherical, obviously, and it's Saturn's largest moon, larger than the planet Mercury and this is the only moon that we're discussing today that has been explored by a land ender, by a human made lander, the Hohygan's Heightened Lander, a beast of planetary exploration. There are videos available online that show the landing imagery sent back by the Hygan's probe. You should watch them, but try to imagine a tighten landing what

this world is like. Unlike so many of the moons that we've surveyed before, this approach is very unique in the Solar System. On Titan, we descend from orbit through a thick, cold atmosphere and everything below is shrouded from our view from space by this murky haze, and you descend through the freezing fog and strong winds shake your landing craft. Yeah, this is the only moon in our Solar System that has clouds in a dense atmosphere, mostly

nitrogen and methane. And the atmospheric pressure is is about greater than Earth, so roughly the same as you would find at the bottom of a swimming pool. That's right, But that's actually so that's heavy sounding to us like you. You wouldn't want to spend your life at the bottom of a swimming pool, but it's tolerable. It's tolerable compared to almost everywhere else in the Solar System. Venus. Yeah, so in Venus you might have what like nine atmospheres

or something like that. It's yeah, you couldn't survive. Uh. And then other places there's almost no atmosphere, atmosphere pressure to speak of. It's nearly like being in a vacuum. Titan is close. Yeah, this is the Goldilocks finding the bed or the porridge that is. It's not ideal, but

in a pinch my ears, but I can survive. But so you land on Titan, You land in the middle of an equatorial desert, and there's a strange sound and tactle sensation you experience upon touchdown, not a dry thud like hitting rock, but a splat, the sound of the soil that you're landing on being wet. Welcome to bog World. Now, it's maybe not exactly fair to say bog world, because the soil isn't as wet as the mud you'd find in many bogs on Earth, but relative to the rest

of the Solar System, it's bog world. Titan is bog world, and as far as we know, Titan is the only place in the Solar System other than Earth that has beaches. Some planets have subterranean oceans covered in ice a rock, right, We've talked about that. Some have frozen polar water ice or frozen ice surfaces entirely, But Titan has liquid lakes on a terrestrial surface. However, those lakes are not the

water lakes we know and love. Titan has a hydro carbon hydrological system, which translates to seas and rivers of liquid methane. So in the equatorial region there's this vast desert of ancient water waterways, ancient river beds, and dried up coastlines, and towards the poles you'll come across clouds and storms and methane lakes. Now, Titan itself is it's it's mass is composed mainly of water in the form

of ice and rocky material. In fact, Titan is so cold negative trees fahrenheit or negative celsius that water essentially acts like rock and lava too on our world. So the ground you walk on, I guess it's ice mostly, but it is water water ice that acts like rock. Yeah, So it's it's crazy to think about that that it's this this it sounds like an alternate dimension where everything is a little skewed instead of instead of motions of water, it is it's it's this other substance. And uh and

and the rock is actually water. It's like everything's turned on its head in topsy turvy. Totally true. And that's actually something that's covered in a fantastic lecture that I listened to given in two thousand eleven by the Nasive planetary scientists Christopher McKay about the possibility of life on Titan. And Uh. I listened to this lecture. I thought it was great, and I just wanted to cover some of the things he talks about and maybe we can have

a discussion about what they mean. But so in this Christopher McKay lecture, he begins by noting a curious fact. So several years back, we had detected that titans atmosphere features a hydrogen flux towards the surface. That means there's hydrogen in the atmosphere and it appears to flow down to the ground and then not come back up. So what's happening to the hydrogen on the surface of Titan. We will come back to that question. So McKay talks about how all forms of life needs some way of

harnessing energy. So on Earth there are two primary strategies. You've got like photosynthesis, right, capturing sunlight energy, and then you've got chemical energy redox chemical energy. So life also needs several other things. It needs carbon, you know, organic molecules to make it tissues out of for food and stuff like that. And it needs liquid water. I've already

discussed why that's a little problematic here exactly. So there is gonna be no liquid water, and the main constraint on an environment being able to host life on Earth is the absence of liquid water. You can mess with all the other variables, and as long as there's liquid water there, there's still probably going to be something alive. This is why world's with some form of liquid water.

Sort of. The hot spots of Solar system astrobiology investigation like Europa Enceladus, another moon of Saturn will get to in a bid, and the recently discovered spongy wet spots that appear seasonally on Martian soil. I don't know if you've read about that, but it's pretty cool, uh that they found that, you know, there's some parts of the

soil on Mars that seemed to thaw seasonally. So even if there's just occasionally liquid water, there's more hope than than this world of Titan, which seems to just be ever in the freezer. Yeah, but McKay point out something interesting. It's not necessarily the compound H two O itself. That's important because there are plenty of worlds full of completely frozen water ice that that don't seem to be good candidates for for life. Life is ultimately a subset of chemistry.

It's biochemistry, and that chemistry needs a liquid medium to take place in. Liquid is sort of like the canvas on which you you know, paint the wonderful artistry of complex chemistry. So maybe it's not water that's the key. It's just liquid. It's the liquid phase of matter. So how about those methane lakes on Titan. In many ways, Titan is analogous to Earth. So Christopher McKay points out that,

like Earth, that has a nitrogen based atmosphere. And if you're saying, wait a second, I thought we had an oxygen atmosphere, oxygen is only about our atmospheric composition, about seventy eight percent of our atmosphere is nitrogen, and if our atmosphere were entirely oxygen, this would be a problem for you at high concentrations at regular atmospheric pressure, oxygen pure oxygen's toxic. It'll destroy your lungs. As we mentioned,

it has roughly comparable atmospheric pressure. Mackay compares it to being under fifteen feet of water. That sounds about right, compared to what you said right being at the bottoms. So it's not like Venus, it's not like Mars. It's it's not you know, it's not the nicest place to be compared to what we're used to on Earth, but it's closer to Earth than anything else we're aware of. It has a hydrological cycle with clouds and rain storms. Now this is crazy. Yeah, I I don't usually think

of anywhere except Earth having rain. Yeah, and here we're talking about what methane rains. I say, yeah, methane, of course, So the methane is going to be H four raining down from the sky. And speaking of methane, Titan is rich with organic compounds. Now this doesn't mean stuff that we know to be alive or organic compounds are just a sort of group name for carbon based com pounds like methane that are very often associated with life, but

they exist independent of life. You don't have to have life to make them, but if you want carbon based life to exist, these compounds need to be around. But the biggest difference is temperature, right, So average Earth temperature is almost two hundred degrees c integrated more than average Titan temperature. So it's like a cold twin of Earth.

All this stuff that you see going on on Earth, you know, the hydrological cycle, the chemistry of the atmosphere, all that kind of stuff sort of has a cousin that happens on Titan. But it's the freezing cousin. It's the much colder cousin. And that kind of makes you wonder if one of Earth's main features, life also has

a cold cousin. So this is a situation where we're forced to to not dream of an entirely different form of life, but to say life as we know it existing a slightly different world like but basically all things being equal, if the parameters were skewed a little bit, could a similar model of life still exists, Well, it'd be life as we know it in one way but not in another. So it would be carbon based life.

So it's life as we know it in that sense, and we don't know of any other way that you could possibly build life, you know, without carbon, though it

could be possible, we just don't know. Um. But it is completely unlike Earth life in that all Earth life is water based, and this would be methane based, so it would be it would be completely alien biochemistry in that sense, but not in the sense that we'd still have to imagine it's based on carbon, because carbon is the only chemical basis we can think of for building up the kind of complex molecules that we see in life. So what did the the Huygens probe find when it

landed on Titan. Did it find microbes? You can guess no, because we would have heard about that, But it wasn't equipped to find microbes. There could have been microbes there and it wouldn't have known. It's not like it came back so exactly. Um. And that might be a problem if it did, because as as we now know, it's very important to protect Earth from alien microbes. But a

little bit about the science behind the Huygens probe. So we when we sent the Huyggans probe to uh to Titan, we built it sort of like a raft, as a floating boat like craft, because scientists thought that Titan was going to be covered in a in a surface wide liquid ocean of methane. And the reason for this is because they were able to detect previously that the atmosphere was rich in methane. And atmospheric methane doesn't last forever. It gets slowly destroyed by radiation from the Sun and

transformed into other compounds. So you can't have a methane atmosphere that just hangs around for the entire lifetime of a planet, you know, four billion years or however old it is since Titan was formed, so there has to be something on the surface to replenish it. And from this they reasoned, it looks like there's liquid methane on the surface of Titan which is slowly evaporating being processed

turned into atmospheric methane gas. And so they thought, okay, we'll drop a boat into these methane lakes and we'll see what happens. But instead of dropping into lakes, it dropped into the equatorial region of Titan, which was something more like a desert, but the probe was able to detect that it was not as totally desert like as

it first seemed. As we mentioned before, the ground is soft, soft, and damp, moist soil, and one instrument was also able to notice that methane steam was coming out of the soil where the relatively hot spacecraft was sticking into it. Okay, so if there's liquid all throughout the soil, this liquid methane throughout the soil on Titan, that seems like an analogy to what we experience on Earth, where pretty much anywhere there is moisture of any kind you can find life.

By by analogy, it seems like if there's life on Titan, we should be able to find it all over the place, even in the desert. Yeah, even in the desert, because even in deserts on Earth, if there you know, there's any water content whatsoever present, you're going to find some kind of life. So in his lecture, Mackay asks, Okay, so if there's carbon based life on Titan that lives in liquid methane instead of liquid water, how would we be able to look for clues of this? And one

one clue is looking at atmospheric engineering. So you've probably read about how in looking for exoplanets, they've theorized that one way we could look for life on exoplanets is by looking for oxygen, right, because the presence of anomalous oxygen is a sign of geoengineering by organisms, Like our atmosphere is not oxygen because of the physics of planetary formation. That wasn't it wasn't like that when Earth was formed. Uh, Earth's atmosphere is oxygen because it's full of critters like

plants and cyanobacteria. Organisms change the atmosphere of our planet exactly. It's their waste, it's their waste products, their poop, you know. So they there or I guess they're they're breathing out. I don't know, however you want to phrase it. They take in sunlight and CEO two. They use the energy from the sunlight to split up the CEO two, make body parts out of the carbon, and then spit out the oxygen as a waste product. And so you could

look at the original oxygenation of Earth's atmosphere. Is this mass poisoning event We just happen to be the kinds of animals that evolved to thrive amidst this mass poisoning and to work well with it. So how can we look for similar clues on Titan. Well, you would have to imagine what an organism that gets along in liquid nitrogen to do to make a living. So you imagine a carbon based life form that lives in liquid methane and imagine how does it eat? What does it do? Well?

Titan has tons of compounds on it that make perfectly good food. One one example would be acetylene, or another would be ethane. So if you're an organism on Titan, food is just all over the place. In McKay's words, food is quote falling from the sky. It's not not hard to get a meal there. But organisms like us

get energy by a combination of eating food. So taking in these carbon based compounds and then breathing, taking an oxygen, and then reacting that carbon and oxygen to create usable energy and the molecules we need and the waste product of CEO two. Our cold counterparts on Titan could perform a pretty much analogous process by reacting carbon based compounds and food with instead of oxygen hydrogen, and that would create usable energy and then a waste product containing carbon

and hydrogen like H four methane. Uh So, if there's life on Titan, mackay and his colleagues predicted that it would probably alter the chemistry of the surface by depleting it of the compounds it eats and breathes, like acetylene, ethane and hydrogen. And remember we started with that missing hydrogen, so that there's hydrogen flowing down to the surface and

then disappearing. So the most fascinating possibility is that some kind of organism at the surface is consuming hydrogen spitting out methane as part of its metabolism and respiration, and that's how it gets along. Now we don't know. This isn't proof, right, we don't know that there's something alive on Titan, but but it definitely makes Titan worth a closer look. I think we should send more probes, right most definitely, we definitely we should definitely send more probes

because one reason is always more problem. One reason, of course, is that you know, if we find and this is something that McKay points out, is that if we find life on Mars or Europe, current life, pass life, etcetera, there's a chance that it's related to us, right, But when in contemplating Titan, this would be an entirely different form, it would be it would be unconnected to us because

it would be based on a different biochemistry. Yeah, I mean, there's no liquid methane based biochemistry on that and then and there probably couldn't be because Earth is just not cold enough. Like we look at at Titan and say, how could you live on a world that cold? But any life form on Titan would look at Earth as like like we look at Venus. You know, it's just this unbearable hell of intense heat where you know, the stuff you need to live, the liquid methane you need,

just it boils. You know, you can't you can't sustain it. So anyway, we mentioned sending those probes, what what would they look for if we did send probes, Well, McKay suggests one thing, look for evidence of the chemistry of life there. So the example he gives is that organisms on Earth we get oxygen easy, but nitrogen is difficult for us to come by. So we have enzymes that have to bust up nitrogen into molecules in the atmosphere

and make them into ammonia in h three. Now, on a world like Titan, the problem wouldn't be getting uh, getting nitrogen making ammonia. It would be getting oxygen because there's no sygen available except that which is locked up in the frozen H two oh, the water ice that makes the rocky ground of this planet. So you'd see organisms with enzymes for melting water ice and getting that

oxygen out of it. Uh. And then another thing he finally suggests is to scoop up organic material from Titan and then look for biases in the distribution of organic materials, you know, so looking for molecules that are appearing and anomalous concentrations that wouldn't be explained by inorganic chemistry, but would be explained if you're looking at a place where the chemistry of the surfaces being processed constantly by life forms.

But the idea of life on Titan is interesting to me because of how cold it is, So we know there's a basic correlation between heat and metabolism, right, so a life form that lives on Titan is probably a very slow moving form of life, slow metabolism, slow life cycle, slow evolution. And this kind of makes me wonder about weird thought experiment extending out from this, what would intelligent life that evolved on a freezing liquid methane world look like?

Because in many ways, I think our idea of intelligence is heavily colored by speed. Right, So can you imagine an organism that has as much technological and problem solving intelligence as a human but does everything literally one hundred times slower, but potentially living a lot longer as well.

So I mean, I guess it all becomes relative. Then I guess it's it's just harder for us to contemplate, Like I have a hard time imagining something that's not a like whale sloth in this scenario, and then wondering, and then it's even a greater leap for me to try to imagine this alien ethane based whale sloth even developing crude technology on this world. Like right, It's just it's almost too much for me to fathom. I mean sirens obviously, Oh yeah, well let us not speak of

the sirens of Titan. But I I agree with you about the difficulty of imagining you know, the whale sloth like um, And I just tried to do some math here, like if a development happened in humans one million years after the emergence of the species. Could you expect a hypothetical liquid methane alien world that did everything a hundred times slower to reach the same development in a hundred million years. Well, that wouldn't be ruled out by the

age of the universe. But then that sort of introduces questions about like, well, wait a minute, I mean, how would you even get a complex nervous system. Because it took life on Earth what like four billion years to evolve from the first self replicating molecules to logical intelligence, So would it take life on a cold planet four hundred billion years? Uh? And again I'm just using a hundred times faster or a hundred times slower as a hypothetical.

I don't know exactly how slower it would be, but if it would take something like that long, we've got a lot of a long time to wait before we meet these slow moving organisms, because that's much older than the universe. Yeah, and again, to say nothing of the various cataclysms and extinction events that are likely to out to occur in the history of any light sustaining, life

evolving world. So it might very well be on the path towards creating this and then whammouh, some some body uh in Saturn's gravitational system just crashes into you and wipes everything out. Yeah, but then again, I also think of a very slow organism as a very resilient organism, you know, which is hard to put them down. Yeah that you know the right comments, comments, strike the right the right meteor and certainly do that. Has anybody ever

created a sci fi alien like that? I'm trying to think of one, Like an alien that's just amazingly slow. The ants sort of sort of like the ants. Yeah, I'm I'm not remembering one off hand. They tend to be this kind of alien would tend to be the the the the marginally experienced alien in a in a rather rich diverse pantheon of alien species like this would not be your central character because they're so unlike humans.

This would be like the one character that you go to, uh, you know, about halfway through the novel to get a little elder inside. I guess, well, it makes me think that there there'd be a great creeping menace because imagine you colonize the world with some hundred times slower than you cold cold liquid methane intelligent organisms, and at first it doesn't seem like they're bothered by your presence. You

can live in peaceful harmony. But it just took them a hundred years to decide that they were going to destroy you. Yeah, they would play a different you know, long term game. Uh. And so I certainly I have encountered that in fantasy novels before, or what happens when you have the great threat does not have to that doesn't have to worry about the day to day, even year to year. I can sleep for centuries and wait for the game, the game board to improve and the

situations to favor it once more. So you know, you could see a similar model, I guess, uh with you know, interplanetary situation, interplanetary politics, and then the great disadvantage we're always at we gotta go get the groceries. Yeah, so they can say, you know what, we can lose the next three hundred interplanetary elections. You know, for us, that's just that's just a nap, it's small hyperions. One last thing I want to talk about for and we mentioned

future probes going to Titen. Definitely in favor of that titan. Last I heard was not the top priority for for future missions, but it's you know, it's something that's being discussed and there are some proposals. But one proposal for future exploration of Titans surface is the use of a type of robot that I think is really interesting. It's been referred to in the press as the super ball bot,

but I I like the design of this. I've talked about it on the other podcast I do forward thinking before. But the robot design is a rover that's based on what's called tin Segreti architecture, and essentially it is a mobile robot that looks like a jumble of rods and wires. So if you just made a tangled ball of sticks and wires connecting them at the ends, that's what it would look like. And it moves by tensing and relaxing the wires, so it kind of tumbles along on the

ground exactly. And it's resistant to damage from hard landings and stuff, so that this makes it an interesting to sign for a planetary rover to explore. But I've also always thought this would be a great design for a killer robot in the sci fi horror movie, like just this, this tangle of rods and wires and it's kind of cute, it's kind of funny. It just kind of tumbles up to you, but then it wraps around you and tense.

It's the wires and then you're in trouble. Well, you know, it makes sense because there's at least one killer robot movie that took place on the moons of Saturn. Saturn three Um had Kirk Douglass in it. Oh, Michael, but Kirk, this is the movie. You sent me the trailer too, and it has Harvey Kitel with like he's he's looking very slick in it. Yeah, he very Unharvey Kitel. Yeah, he's he's not his least sleazy roll I think, and the kind of Flash Gordon asthetic and he actually looks

good in it. Yeah, fair Faucet in it as well. And that has a killer robot in it, not the greatest killer robot from cinematic history. But you know, beggars can't be choosers, especially when you're looking at films that involve the Moons of Saturn. Joe, it looks like we're coming up on Raya. Yeah, that's right. So Raya after Titan Raya is gonna seem like kind of a let down, Raya or Rhea. I've seen it, said Ria. Also, so Ria, I don't want to downplay the beauty and majesty of

this wonderful moon. And so it's the second largest moon of Jupiter, second largest after Titan. Of course, Titan being the largest, is about one six the massive Pluto, more than of the width of Earth's moon. It's spherical, uh. In terms of life potential, there's not a whole lot going on here. It's it's and the sort of almost half lunicized sphere of water, ice and rock with relatively low density. In many ways, it's comparable to the next

moon we're gonna passdone. And as far as surface features go, it's got craters and it's essentially a serene, beautiful cold sphere, cratered in silent and in a far on a far lesser note, apparently the latest Independence Day and Dependence Day resurgence involves at least a minor point about humanity building at the fenced outpost here. So I don't know why. Maybe it just seems like a nice boring place to put all those guns. I suppose, you know, there's sort

of like a if you pronounce it ray uh. That's sort of like ray ray gun. Yeah, okay, that makes sense. That probably makes us as much sense as anything. It makes a lot of sense, Robert, makes so much sense. Let's spiral on in and move on to the next InterPlaNet. Yes, Dione, as we mentioned, a small cratered moon mean radius of about three five kilometers, and what we're looking at here is a hard frozen lump with a dense core, probably a silicate rock, and the remainder of it is is

just ice water ice. Yeah, a very fine ice powder that's basically like smoke from Saturn's e ring can instantly bombards Diony, and the dust from the e ring ultimately comes from Enceladus, which has prominent guys are activity that we discuss in a bet. Great wisps mar the surface of Dionne and uh, these turn out these are actually bright canyon ice walls indicating past tectonic activity, and these ice cliffs could be a mature phase of the so

called tiger stripes that are encountered on Enceladus. Right, So we're gonna talk about the surface of Enceladus in a bit. But Enceladus is a is a younger, smoother kind of surface but it does have these stripes along it. So you're saying like, if if Enceladus were allowed to mature millions more years, it could end up looking more like some of the surface features of Dion. Yeah, this is essentially the old boring uh inencellatus. But nothing nothing in

the sphere of Saturn is boring. No, no, not boring, but the the the less interesting version of the same lunar idea. I guess we are spiraling in faster and it's something we've gotta acknowledge. Now. The next one is going to be the moon teeth this or teth this uh so teeth. This is about sixty five of the mass of the dwarf planet series. It's pretty small, roughly of the width of Earth's Moon, roughly spherical. There's not a lot of suspected potential for endogenous life on teeth this,

uh and and teeth. This is composed mostly of water ice with no real atmosphere. Is this frozen ice ball tidally locked in orbit around Saturn. But the coolest feature of teeth. This is something that I came across I think last year. I was reading about this and I I just love it. I'm not quite sure why. It's

just a surface coloration feature. But in July, NASA reported that in enhanced color images from the Cassini spacecraft there were a series of these arc shaped red streaks that could be seen side by side parallel on the surface of teeth Us, and it looks like Freddy Krueger slashed the moon with his glove. It wasn't the first time the arcs had been seen. They've been spotted faintly visibly as early as two thousand four, I think, but this

was the first time they were imaged really clearly. And it's fascinating because we were not positive at what causes them, at least as far as I could find, and maybe somebody has a private theory somewhere, but I I couldn't find that these are explained yet. They they're probably geologically young, these red streaks, because they cross over older features like craters, But what created them and why are they red in color?

Scientists don't know. So there was a NASA JPL press release from that mentioned speculation on that they could be maybe exposed ice with some kind of chemical impurities where they could be out gassing from inside teeth This, but ultimately we don't know yet. All right, well, let's leave this moon behind us and move on to uh one of we've already uh discussed a little bit, and that is Enceladus Une about the size of Arizona. Yes, could

fit within the borders of Arizona. Another way to to imagine the circumference of this moon, it is not very large, is that if you were to punch a hole in the earth along the borders of the state of Texas, you could drop And why would you want to do that? Why? So down on it. But just if you were to do it, take a cookie cutter Texas sized cookie cutter punched out that part of Earth, you could drop Enceladus

through the whole. So, coming after some of the giants we've seen like Titan and and Rhea, you might be kind of underwhelmed by its size, But do not be underwhelmed,

because Enceladus is quite interesting. Yeah. One of the crazy features here is that Enceladus has hydrothermal vents that spew water, vapor, and ice particles from an underground ocean beneath the icy crust of Enceladus, and the plume material contains organic compounds, volatile gases, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, salts, and silica, and it's all expelled out to a distance three times the radius of insult Us and at a speed of approximately

eight hundred miles per hour or four per second. It's a continuous eruption that continually refreshes the Moon's surface. Uh. And it cloaks the entire Moon in an enormous halo of fine ice dust, which then in turn feeds Saturn's ear ring, which we mentioned earlier. Right, So the ear ring is this outer ring around Saturn. You've seen those concentrated inner rings. That the ear ring is more this great vast haze extend extending outward, uh from from Saturn.

And it's uh oh oh, it's cool. I love the jets coming out of the south pole of this planet feeding this. And there's an even cooler implication I want to mention in a bit. But there's another striking feature of Insulatus that you would notice long before your spacecraft sets down if you're landing on the planet. Enceladus is the most reflective large object in the entire Solar System.

It's like a bright mirror reflecting the sun straight it into your eyes, and Enceladus may be alive, not the planet itself as we discussed with the Appetus, but but something within the planet. So Enceladus is believed to have a rocky core surrounded by a smooth, high, highly reflective ice crust, but in between them, evidence indicates the presence of subterranean oceans, much like other moons we observed around Jupiter. Now, I've seen claims of both global subterranean oceans and regional

regional subterranean seas positioned under the south pole um. But either way, the ocean has started to become intensely interesting to scientists, especially astrobiologists. Now why is that, Well, we've

seen examples before where these where these subworld oceans. I mean, we have liquid water and then clearly we have we have jets of it, we have we have activity going on here, there's energy taking place, there's warmth and with liquid and there, and there are important compounds as you mentioned earlier, what's in those plumes coming out of the southern pole polar region of Enceladus. Again, the Cassini spacecraft

detected organic compounds carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, salt, silica, volatile gases. Uh, that's good stuff. If you look on live, going right down the list, checking off many of the key factors necessary for life as we know it. But do we know it? No, we don't. And that's the thing. The Cassini spacecraft is not equipped much like the Huygan's lander. It's not equipped to detect the presence of life, but

it can, it can look for clues. Uh So the material and these plumes go all over the place, sometimes it falls back down to Enceladus forms this filmy mist in space which you mentioned, becomes part of Saturn's e ring. And I'd just like to point out that if I understand this correctly, if it turns out there is life in the subterranean ocean of Enceladus, it's probably being spray

out in these jets. And if the jets become Saturn's e ring, one of the rings of Saturn is a graveyard of alien microbes spread hundreds of thousands of miles into space. That is crazy to think of it that way. It's crazy or it's awesome and it's creepy. Either way, I think that's great. So much like Titan to do the real exploration and discovery work about the potential for life on Enceladus, we need another mission, got to get

back there. And I actually just recently read a piece in Scientific American that was talking about one of the people who's working on trying to plan such a mission, the astronomer Caroline Porko. And this kind of mission obviously is not easy to devise or or too fund But best of luck to them all. Right now, Joe, as we as we leave this moon and make our way towards our next and final destination here our final object of study, I do want to stress what you're about

to look at is not a death star. It's a moon. It's not space station, it's a moon. Um, I'm talking of course about Mimus. Then why are we called an instructor beam. Well, we're gonna have some questions then for for minus. But but yeah, it basically Mimus is big claim to fame. Is it's just a frozen moon that looks a lot like the Death Star from Star Wars. It's got this big crater that looks a lot like the weapon. What would you call it the crater in

the Death Star from which the planet destroying beam comes out? Yeah, yeah, an enormous crater uh known as the Herschel Crater. It is a hundred thirty kilometers or eighty miles. While it dominates the landscape, giving the world's appearance the world an appearance of a great eye. Uh. The crater covered Moon is less than one miles and kilometers in mean radius. It has roughly the land area of Spain. Not very big. The not very big, and again, most of this visible

side is crater. It's not perfectly round either, more of an an ovoid. The shape and it's a low density suggest that it's consists almost entirely of water ice, which is the the only substance we've ever detected on Mimus. It's tidally locked. And this is crazy. It's it's believed that the impact that created the Herschel crater probably came close to just shattering it entirely. That's how because you know, a crater that big on a world this small, Uh, you know, it was just a hair away from just

breaking it into pieces. So should that have happened, would it have become another ring of Saturn? Potentially? Yeah? And I don't know exactly how the ring formation works, so we don't know. I guess, well, um, if nothing else, it might end up resembling you know, one of like the potato moon that we mentioned earlier. You know, we might still have a sizeable lump, but it would be

a lesser lump. It would be one of those, uh those other lump moons that are not discussing in this episode, you know, among the among the fifty three named moons of Saturn. Now, one of the interesting things about Mimus, though, is that it should experience more tidal heating than Enceladus. And yet while that frozen world, as we discussed both geysers and h and and clearly experiences internal heat, Mimus is just an unchanging waste land of ice. Oh yeah,

we should have mentioned about enceladusts. I think I forgot to mention that the the what is the energy source? You know, why is there? Well, it's some of the same explanations that we saw in some of the moons of Jupiter. It's it's internal stress caused by the orbit and gravitational influence around it. So it's got a not perfectly circular orbit. There's some changing gravitational fields, and this

causes stretching and flexing inside Enceladus that leads to heat. Yeah, a lot of kinds of comparisons are often made between what we know about Enceladus and what we know about Mimus, to the degree that some have speculated on the assability of a liquid ocean in Minus. But it's such a small moon again, the size of Spain. It's it's hardly the best candidate. But yeah, you could say there's there's still an outside chance. So that's the case. Okay, we

seem to be passing Mimus at this point. I guess we were not trapped in a tractor beam. However, we do seem to be moving rather quickly towards the surface of Saturn. Now, Joe, Oh, No, Saturn, which one seemed quite serene and peaceful and beautiful, uh, glowing moons and it's it's frozen worlds and it's nice, you know, black white harmony plant lunar body here, but yeah, I know it's able to escape. If you notice that as we get closer, Saturn is making a sound. Do you hear that?

It's kind of like uh in Raiders of the Lost Ark, that scene where they zoom in on the box with the arc in it and it's making that satanic miall miallmy Allinois. I can't quite hear that. Over the two thousand and one space honestly monolith coral arrangement. But that's because I have headphones in listening to that. I always listen to that whenever I move in closer and closer

to a large, scary planetary object. The folks, I should let you know that while we were working on this episode, Robert shared with me a fantastic mix that's sort of like a Saturn influenced electronic music mix that Robert, You've got to share this on the lange. Oh yeah, I will. I will make sure that there's a link to this in the landing page. I believe it came from the

record label Acacia. Uh. Definitely worth checking out. They put out a number of cool, cool tracks and cool releases over the years, including some stuff from the Weirding Module, which is one of my one of my favorite musical acts out there. This thing definitely made me wish that there was a good John Carpenter movie taking place on a moon of Saturn. Yeah. Yeah, we need perhaps we need more John Carpenter space movies, that's what you're saying.

More like Ghosts of Mars, That's what I'm saying. Ghosts of Mimus, Ghosts of Titan one for each get to get ice cube on the phone and Jason Statham. All right, so there you have it, Uh, the moons of Saturn. So now you have both both the moons of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter covered on. Stuff to blow your mind. Now, there was absolutely no way we were going to cover everything interesting about Saturn and its moons. So there's tons more to learn out there, and we're

constantly learning more. Yeah. Yeah, so so feel free to look into this and research it yourself. You know, you should feel free. Don't let us tell you that that you can't learn about Saturday on your own. But anyway, yeah, we we do encourage you to do that because it is a fascinating planetary system and all those moons are great stuff. Uh and and I feel like we could have gotten into even more about the rings sometimes. We could probably do a whole episode just about the rings,

the ring moonlits and everything like that. Yeah, indeed, just rings in general, because we could discuss other rings on other worlds in our own solar system. So hey, if you will have feedback you want to share with us about this, you can go to all the normal places to do it. Head on over to our various social media accounts. Were on Facebook, we're blow the Mind there, though, if you follow us on Facebook, make sure you're fault.

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