A molecule that could help build otherworldly life is present on Saturn’s moon Titan, researchers have discovered.
Vinyl cyanide, a compound predicted to form membranelike structures, is created in Titan’s upper atmosphere, scientists report July 28 in Science Advances. There’s enough vinyl cyanide (C2H3CN) in the moon’s liquid methane seas to make about 10 million cell-like balls per cubic centimeter of ocean, researchers calculate. On Earth, about a million bacteria are found in a cubic centimeter of ocean water near shore.
“It’s very positive news for putative-Titan-life studies,” says Jonathan Lunine, a planetary scientist at Cornell University who was not involved in the new study.
Titan has no water, usually considered a prerequisite for life. Instead of water, freezing-cold Titan has liquid methane. There’s even a methane cycle that mimics Earth’s water cycle (SN: 3/21/15, p. 32). But Titan is so cold — usually about –178° Celsius — that the smallest unit of life on Earth, the cell, would shatter in the moon’s subzero seas.
In 2015, Lunine and Cornell colleagues James Stevenson and Paulette Clancy proposed a way life might exist in methane. Computer simulations predicted that vinyl cyanide (also called acrylonitrile or propenenitrile) could make flexible bubbles called azotosomes that would be stable in liquid methane (SN: 4/30/16, p. 28). Those bubbles might act much as cell membranes do on Earth, sheltering genetic material and concentrating biochemical reactions needed for life.