Although rainstorms are rare on Titan (less than once per Titanian year, which is 29.5 Earth years), they occur much more frequently than planetary researchers expected.
“I would have thought these would be once-a-millennium events, if even that. So this is quite a surprise,” said study co-author Dr. Jonathan Mitchell, from the University of California, Los Angeles.
“The storms create massive floods in terrain that are otherwise deserts. Titan’s surface is strikingly similar to Earth’s, with flowing rivers that spill into great lakes and seas, and the moon has storm clouds that bring seasonal, monsoon-like downpours. But Titan’s precipitation is liquid methane, not water.”
The study also found that the extreme methane rainstorms may imprint Titan’s icy surface in much the same way that extreme rainstorms shape Earth’s rocky surface.
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