Maybe it’s aliens
‘We’ve got a new mystery on our hands’: Titan’s weird wobble just got even stranger
Titan’s atmosphere doesn’t rotate in sync with its surface. Instead, it tilts and shifts like a spinning top that changes its orientation with the seasons.
“The behaviour of Titan’s atmospheric tilt is very strange,” Lucy Wright, lead author of the new research and a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol in the U.K., said in a statement. “We think some event in the past may have knocked the atmosphere off its spin axis, causing it to wobble.”
Scientists thought the direction of the tilt would be influenced by either Saturn’s gravity or the position of the sun, as is often the case in planetary systems — meaning it would change as Titan orbited Saturn and the sun. But observations show that the tilt direction doesn’t move. Instead, it stays pointed the same way in space, as if unaffected by those external forces.
Well, if the atmosphere isn’t affected by THOSE external forces, maybe it’s affected by OTHER external forces, and I think we all know who’s responsible, don’t we?
Varley’s Gaia trilogy is excellent. The first book was published back in 1979, long enough ago that this trilogy and this author are largely forgotten, which is a real shame.
Though I don’t as a rule much like short stories, Varley’s were an exception and I have a collection of his short works in my library. I have his near-future SF novel Red Thunder on my TBR shelves, but I’ve never read it — near-future is a hard sell for me; I wouldn’t have got it at all if it were by someone else. Now that I’m thinking about it, I’m making a note to find it and bring it upstairs. I mean, doesn’t this sound like fun?
As Chinese and US spacecraft compete to be the first to land on Mars, a former astronaut, his cousin, and four teens from Florida decide to take matters into their own hands. If they can quickly build their own space-worthy ship using scrap metal, appliances, and power tools, they have a chance to come from behind—thanks to an inventive new power source that can propel them to the Red Planet within three days. No guts, no glory . . .
Honestly, I think this sounds great.
AND, of course the weird stuff going on with Titan’s atmosphere must be aliens. What else would it be?
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