THE clouds of Saturn鈥檚 moon Titan hide what appears to be a giant duck
floating in a hydrocarbon ocean, say astronomers who used the Keck Telescope in
Hawaii to peer through the haze.
According to Bruce Macintosh of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in
California, the images reveal 鈥渁 bright, vaguely duck-shaped thing鈥� on the
moon鈥檚 surface. Surrounding this is a dark region that reflects only 3 per cent
of infrared light, which could be hydrocarbon ice, or even a vast sea of liquid
methane and ethane, the researchers suggest.