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Understanding Titan's tholins
- Video Online only
- Title Understanding Titan's tholins
- Released: 12/06/2006
- Length 00:04:26
- Language English
- Footage Type Documentary
- Copyright ESA
- Description
Little is known how four billion years ago, life emerged on Earth out of a pre-biotic "soup" featuring complex organic molecules. Saturn's moon Titan is believed to resemble the pre-biotic Earth, because the large distance from the Sun has "deep frozen" its development state similar that of the early Earth. Tholins are a slush of complex organic molecules that instruments on the Huygens probe detected in Titans atmosphere. In a French laboratory experiments are now underway to recreate tholins in a Titan-like gas mixture...to ultimately understand how complex organic molecules--and which ones--might have been present in our own Earth's pre-biotic atmosphere.