Some lovely pictures I took of the moon (big white circle) and Jupiter (small white dot beneath) during the autumnal equinox with my digital camera.

September 22, 2010.  It was a Wednesday night, and my second quarter at Medill had just begun.  Earlier that day, I received the astronomy beat for my Health & Sciences reporting class, a beat I dreamed of having for months.

The cosmos had me at hello as soon as my mom taped up a diagram of the solar system in my room when I was little.  Movies like Mars Attacks and Event Horizon and the TV show Star Trek: Voyager only increased my thirst for knowledge of what lies beyond.
But for the first 23 years and 9 months of my life, I really hadn’t done much about it besides check out a couple of picture books when I was in the fourth grade.  So when my name was put on the same line as astronomy, I was ecstatic….

For a moment.  Then I realized I had a ton of research to do.  I had no idea what was going on up there.  That knocked me down a notch, and by the time I was on the Red Line closing in on the Howard stop, I was pretty overwhelmed.

And then at 8:15, my classmate Brian Anderson called.  A great man and an amazing journalist.

“Hey Kevin, I was reading up on the full moon tonight.  It’s a Super Harvest Moon, and it’s not going to happen for another 19 years.  I thought maybe you’d like to check up on it.”

There’s Brian, always looking out for me.  I hadn’t done any work yet, so this seemed like a golden opportunity to get a head start.  When I got home, I started to read about this so-called Super Harvest Moon- a full moon on the night that fall begins.  Indeed, it hadn’t happened since the early ‘90s, and there wasn’t going to be another one until 2029.  Depending on which news release you read, it was going to happen at 10:09 p.m. or 10:17 p.m. Chicago time.

Not only that, but Jupiter would be directly beneath the Moon during the equinox.  And Jupiter hadn’t been this close to the Earth, a mere 388 million miles, since 1963.  In other words, Jupiter was going to be a lot more visible than usual.  How lucky could I be?  The stars were literally aligning.  It was my first few hours on the beat, and already I had a pretty big story…or so I thought. (Read more…)

Sand dunes on Earth (top) and dunes on Titan (bottom)

Are tides a peculiarity of our planet? Often, other bodies in our solar system are thought of as static, somewhat boring large rocks that sit around doing nothing. (Ok – they orbit. But what else?)

And yet, when we look at what causes tides, there is no real reason to believe that other planets or satellites should not experience the same phenomenon. Tides on Earth are caused by the Moon’s gravitational pull. Because the Moon is a decent fraction of the Earth’s mass, it is capable of varying the gravitational field we “feel” from the Sun enough to actually make a difference. Water feels the Moon’s field differently than the rest of the crust beneath it, and therefore it is either pulled closer to, or pushed farther away from the Moon, thus creating the effect called tides. Therefore, all that is needed is something that will slightly but significantly alter the main gravitational field on a planet, as well as some sort of fluid that can move around more easily than the  surface beneath it.

So let’s take a look around us. Mars has two satellites, but they are very small and can’t do much of anything. Furthermore, Mars doesn’t really have fluids floating around, there is no atmosphere, and, at least on the surface, no liquid water. One is then inclined to look at the giant gas planets like Saturn and Jupiter—they practically are balls of fluid, and have very large moons. The problem here is that these planets are so large that the moons are minuscule in comparison, and the gravitational field’s variation is minuscule.

Now it’s time to think out of the box: what if a moon, and not a planet, experienced tidal effects? Out of all moons, the one where conditions are perfect for tides is Titan, one of Saturn’s more famous satellites. In fact, when compared to Earth, it’s an even better place to find tides. Titan’s atmosphere is extremely rich and even heavier than Earth’s. Furthermore, even though it does not have a moon of its own, Titan has something better—Saturn. Think of it as the Moon having tides because of effects from the Earth, rather than vice-versa.

The one tricky thing is that Titan, just like our own Moon, is in a locked orbit with Saturn—it is always showing its host planet the same face. (Read more…)