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Space Oddity: The Atmosphere Of Titan Spins In A Different Way From The Saturnian Moon

Usually, a world and its atmosphere rotate in the same direction, but Titan is an exception.

Dr. Alfredo Carpineti headshot

Dr. Alfredo Carpineti

Dr. Alfredo Carpineti headshot

Dr. Alfredo Carpineti

Senior Staff Writer & Space Correspondent

Alfredo (he/him) has a PhD in Astrophysics on galaxy evolution and a Master's in Quantum Fields and Fundamental Forces.

Senior Staff Writer & Space Correspondent

EditedbyKaty Evans

Katy is Managing Editor at IFLScience where she oversees editorial content from News articles to Features, and even occasionally writes some.

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a portion of titan is visible. Some fractal looking dark liquid bodies are seen through the clouds. sunlight shines on one of them.

An infrared view of Titan, with sunlight reflecting on a methane sea.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/University of Idaho

Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, is truly a remarkable world. It has a thick atmosphere as well as rivers, lakes, and seas of methane and hydrocarbons. It is too cold for liquid water, but it is the only other world in the Solar System with liquid on its surface. And of course it rains too. If all of this were not extraordinary, researchers have discovered that the atmosphere wobbles in a different way from the moon.

Celestial bodies spin. It's easy to compare them to a gyroscope, the scientific version of a spinning top. The angular momentum of the celestial body defines its rotational axis, and a lot of different things depend on that. The rotational axis of the Earth, for example, is tilted 23.45 degrees from the plane of its orbit around the Sun. That’s the reason for the seasons. As the planet moves around the Sun, it's always pointing towards the same direction – that’s how we got the North Star.

It seems that the angular momentum axis of the atmosphere is offset from that of the solid body.

Dr Lucy Wright

Titan too has a tilt, but it's very small compared to its orbit around Saturn, just 0.3 degrees. Saturn, on the other hand, has a tilt closer to Earth’s own – 26.7 degrees relative to its orbital plane. Saturn and Titan have seasons too, for this reason. But observations suggest that the atmosphere of Titan rotates with a different tilt altogether.

four images of titan represented spin vertically with the atmosphere showing varying tilds over time.
The wobble of Titan’s atmosphere. The atmosphere is tilted relative to Titan’s solid body, and this tilt varies in size and direction.
Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute Diagram by Lucy Wright

“It seems that the angular momentum axis of the atmosphere is offset from that of the solid body. Over time, the rotation axis of the atmosphere is changing relative to the planet's spin-axis,” lead author Dr Lucy Wright from the University of Bristol, told IFLScience.

Using 13 years of observations from the Cassini mission, the team studied the motion of the atmosphere with respect to the surface. It appears that the atmospheric temperature field of Titan is not centered on its poles as expected.

“The behaviour of Titan’s atmospheric tilt is very strange. Titan’s atmosphere appears to be acting like a gyroscope, stabilising itself in space,” Wright said in a statement. “We think some event in the past may have knocked the atmosphere off its spin axis, causing it to wobble. Even more intriguingly, we’ve found that the size of this tilt changes with Titan’s seasons.”

Exactly what event might have caused this discrepancy is unknown. And the current observations are not clarifying what’s going on.

“What’s puzzling is how the tilt direction remains fixed in space, rather than being influenced by the Sun or Saturn,” said Professor Nick Teanby, co-author and planetary scientist at Bristol. “That would’ve given us clues to the cause. Instead, we’ve got a new mystery on our hands.” 

This research will be useful to the Dragonfly mission, which will bring a flying vehicle to Titan in 2034.

A paper describing the discovery is published in the Planetary Science Journal.


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  • tag
  • Saturn,

  • cassini,

  • Titan,

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