Titan’s Massive Dunes May Be a Comet and Moon Graveyard From the Early Solar System

A new modeling study suggests the dark dunes on Saturn’s largest moon are made of tiny particles created by crashing comets and moonlets billions of years ago

Saturn’s largest moon Titan has an enigmatic air fit for a Dune script. Covered in dark, ridged dunes and craters, the world is wrapped in a golden atmosphere and thought to contain a liquid ocean beneath its icy surface. Its distinct polar and desert regions have intrigued and mystified astronomers for years.

Now, in research presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference this month, scientists suggest a new creation story for Titan’s characteristic ridges. These dark dunes might be a graveyard of fragments from crashed comets and small moons that collided with Titan as the solar system formed.

Titan’s dunes comprise about six million square miles of the moon, but astronomers have long questioned where they came from. Many had thought the sun’s radiation causes tiny particles to fall from the moon’s hazy atmosphere and collect on its surface, where they pile into grainy dunes. But researchers never knew for sure how these microscopic particles enlarged into sand-sized particulates, or whether the atmospheric fragments would have even stayed intact as the dunes took shape.

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