Honolulu Advertiser - August 13, 2009
A paper written by a University of Hawai'i researcher that describes the first storm observed in the tropical latitudes of Saturn's moon Titan will be published today in the journal Nature.
The paper's lead author, Dr. Emily Schaller, wrote it while working as a Hubble Fellow at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa's Institute for Astronomy.
The paper says that rain from large clouds such as those observed on Titan is actually liquid methane and may be responsible for forming the channels and other features near the equator observed by the Huygens probe in 2005.
The huge storm — observed with the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility and the Gemini North telescope on Mauna Kea — covered almost 1.2 million square miles, an area about the size of India.
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