Titan is the only planetary body in our solar system, that could potentially support life on its surface. New research points to the same atmopspheric origin: Comets

Titan’s many similarities to Earth is why astrobiologists are so fascinated by this unusual moon. Its atmosphere is often viewed as an analog to what the Earth's atmosphere may have been like billions of years ago. Despite the 1,2billion km between the two worlds, both may have had their atmospheres created through the gravitational layering and processing of asteroids and comets.

"Titan provides an extraordinary environment to better understand some of the chemical processes that led to the appearance of life on Earth,” says Josep M. Trigo-Rodriguez, of the Institute of Space Sciences (CSIC-IEEC) in Barcelona, Spain. “Titan’s atmosphere is a natural laboratory that, in many aspects, seems to have a strong similitude with our current picture of the pre-biotic atmosphere of Earth."

This is remarkable, because it was thought that Earth and Titan were made from a vastly different recipe of materials in drastically different temperatures, he says.

Earth presumably formed from scorched, oxygen-poor rocks (planetesimals) located in the inner solar system, while Titan formed from rocks that were rich in oxygen and other volatile chemicals (cometesimals) in the outer solar system. Trigo-Rodriguez and Martin-Torres believe the vital organic ingredients in the early Earth's atmosphere were vaporized and swept away by solar winds. The ingredients for the air we breathe today returned about 4 billion years ago, during a cataclysmic rock storm known as the Late Heavy Bombardment (LHB). During this period, oxygen- and volatile-rich materials from the outer solar system were hurled en masse towards the inner solar system.

Chris McKay, a planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center, says comets may have made small contributions to the water, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen content of the Earth's early atmosphere, "but they were not the main source." This is known because the Deuterium/Hydrogen ratios of our oceans do not match the ratios found in comets. He says asteroids hurled our way during the LHB could be the main source of water on Earth.

Trigo-Rodriguez says he and McKay are basically on the same page. "We think that asteroids and comets were key sources for water and organics,” says Trigo-Rodriguez. 4 billion years ago, some asteroids contained so much ice that they would have brought just as much water to our planet as comets did.

Trigo-Rodriguez and Martin Torres studied how hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen isotopes reacted with their environments on Earth and Titan. They looked at data recorded by the Cassini-Huygens probe to better understand the isotopic ratios in Titan's dense, hazy atmosphere.

Different distances from the Sun, different sizes and different environmental conditions led to different chemical evolutions on the two worlds. Even so, both Earth and Titan were hit by similar water-rich bodies, which provided a volatile-rich source for both atmospheres during the late-heavy bombardment.

Outgassing and collisional processing on both worlds led to the production of molecular nitrogen-dominated atmospheres with similar isotopic ratios of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen.

The research paper, "Clues on the importance of comets in the origin and evolution of the atmospheres of Titan," by Trigo-Rodriguez and F. Javier Martin-Torres (Center for Astrobiology, Madrid, Spain), recently published in the journal Planetary and Space Science, offers insight into the atmospheric affinities of Earth and Titan.

Source: arXiv and NASAs Astrobio.net