Saturn's satellite has strange 'magic islands': they may turn out to be porous icebergs

In the seas of Titan, a satellite of Saturn, there are strange "magic islands" that have baffled scientists for years. They may actually represent porous clumps of snow, writes UNN with reference to New Scientist.

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As indicated, these islands supposedly appear and disappear within hours or weeks. And may represent porous, sponge-like clumps of snow that slowly fill with liquid and then sink.

Titan's dense atmosphere is full of complex organic molecules that can stick together and fall to the satellite's surface like snow. Xinting Yu of the University of Texas at San Antonio and her colleagues thought it was the "snow" that might be responsible for the magical islands. To test their idea, they used what we know about these atmospheric compounds and how they would interact with Titan's seas.

Any solids on the surface of these seas would normally be expected to sink immediately because the liquid on Titan is methane, not water.

But this is clearly not the case with the "magic islands," which looked like ephemeral bright spots in the Cassini spacecraft's observations. 

Researchers have found a solution to this problem: if large chunks of snow accumulate on shore, they can form holey ice like sponges. When these porous "icebergs" break off, they can float in Titan's seas long enough to match Cassini's observations. This would work if, as the researchers calculate, the sponge-like structures contain enough empty space - at least 25 to 50 percent, depending on the exact composition of the ice.

However, this does not mean that the mysterious islands are definitely porous icebergs. "We're narrowing down different scenarios for the magic islands, but we don't know the answer yet," says Michael Malaska of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

Other possible explanations include nitrogen bubbles, wind-driven waves, or solid deposits in the oceans. But it proves that Titan's transient islands may actually be floating matter from the atmosphere of this strange world.

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