NASA’s Cassini spacecraft finds liquid for the first time on Saturn’s moon, Titan, but why was Saturn venerated in mythology throughout the ancient world?
NASA has completed analysis on data provided by Cassini’s flyby of Titan in 2013, and has found for the very first time, liquid hydrocarbons in canyons hundreds of meters deep on Saturn’s moon.
What is remarkable is that the formation of the canyons are very similar to how canyons are formed on our terrestrial abode, Earth, and that our planet’s canyons were carved by water and ice.
“Earth is warm and rocky, with rivers of water, while Titan is cold and icy, with rivers of methane. And yet it’s remarkable that we find such similar features on both worlds,” said Alex Hayes, a Cassini radar team associate at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.
According to Space.com, “The new discovery further cements the intriguing similarity between Earth and Titan, the only two worlds in the solar system that are known to harbor stable liquid on their surfaces. (Titan also has a thick atmosphere dominated by nitrogen, as does Earth).”
How is that the most distant planet visible with the naked eye, Saturn, can have a moon so similar to Earth? At 746 million miles or 1.2 billion kilometers from Earth, has Saturn always maintained this distance in the heavens, or did our ancient sky used to look a whole lot different in our ancestors’ past?
Mythological evidence backed by modern science suggests that Saturn used to be the dominate celestial body in the night sky as it was much, much closer to Earth than it is today.