Spanish physicists have discovered evidence of electrical activity in the atmosphere of Saturn's largest moon, Titan. These faint electrical signals in Titan's smoggy atmosphere are similar to the energy radiated by lightning on Earth, which some experts believe helped life form on Earth.
Lead author Juan Antronia Morente, of the University of Granada in Spain said "As of now, lightning activity has not been observed in Titan's atmosphere, but the signals that have been detected are an irrefutable proof for the existence of electric activity."
Morente's team studied data returned from the European Space Agency's Huygens probe. Huygens, a joint mission of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the European Space Agency, was launched in 1997 and landed on Titan in January 2005, sending data for 90 minutes after it reached the surface. The electric field was measured by a sensor on the Huygens probe.
At a brisk -350 degrees Fahrenheit (-180 Celsius), Titan is currently much too cold to host anything close to life as we know it, scientists say. Titan's water is currently frozen into chunks as hard as granite. If those ice rocks were to melt, however, the environment could become more hospitable to the building blocks of life.
With liquid water, the planet could host the formation of amino acids and then full proteins, which drive all biochemistry and set the stage for more complex molecules.