Caltech News Release<br /><br />For Immediate Release<br />December 21, 2004<br /><br />More Stormy Weather on Titan<br /><br />PASADENA, Calif.-- Titan, it turns out, may be a very stormy place.<br />In 2001, a group of astronomers led by Henry Roe, now a postdoctoral<br />scholar at the California Institute of Technology, discovered methane<br />clouds near the south pole of Saturn's largest moon, resolving a<br />debate about whether such clouds exist amid the haze of its<br />atmosphere.<br /><br />Now Roe and his colleagues have found similar atmospheric<br />disturbances at Titan's temperate mid-latitudes, about halfway<br />between the equator and the poles. In a bit of ironic timing, the<br />team made its discovery using two ground-based observatories, the<br />Gemini North and Keck 2 telescopes on Mauna Kea, in Hawaii, in the<br />months before the Cassini spacecraft arrived at Saturn and Titan. The<br />work will appear in the January 1, 2005, issue of the Astrophysical<br />Journal.<br /><br />"We were fortunate to catch these new mid-latitude clouds when they<br />first appeared in late 2003 and early 2004," says Roe, who is a<br />National Science Foundation Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral<br />Scholar at Caltech. Much of the credit goes to the resolution and<br />sensitivity of the two ground-based telescopes and their use of<br />adaptive optics, in which a flexible mirror rapidly compensates for<br />the distortions caused by turbulence in the Earth's atmosphere. These<br />distortions are what cause the well-known twinkling of the stars.<br />Using adaptive optics, details as small as 300 kilometers across can<br />be distinguished despite the enormous distance of Titan (1.3 billion<br />kilometers). That's equivalent to reading an automobile license plate<br />from 100 kilometers away.<br /><br />Still to be determined, though, is the cause of the clouds. According<br />to Chad Trujillo, a former Caltech postdoctoral scholar and now a<br />scientist at the Gemini Observatory,
Basic Error: The accelerating Universe conclusion - reason
Just a couple of questions please about just how far back we can model.
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