Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to speculations on Titan...

Nitrogen, Methane, And ionizing radiation..

In a previous job one of the things we did was create a plasma in a vacuum chamber that emitted a lot of UV and particle radiation- at one point it was decided to add a little methane and nitrogen to the chamber...

It was a disaster- The walls of the chamber turned brown and black and when opened the chamber STANK!!!!

The conclusion was "well, we wont do that again!" but I was curious as to what the hell had happened, so I spent a few hours researching 100's of journals, I finally found an article about trying to simulate the atmosphere of Titan, and it turned out that ionizing a mixture of Nitrogen and Methane results in copious amounts of hydrogen cyanide... which condenses out as a brownish red residue- the stench was described by some of my coworkers as smelling like burnt almonds- this is odd since how many people have actually burnt almonds, much less smelled the results? To me, it just stank- one of the other things I learned is the ability to smell cyanide is a genetic thing, not everyone can smell it...

So Titan is very likely covered with cyanide, just goes to show- You cant lick Titan!!!

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