Toxic Titan

Guest Speaker

Thursday, 11th April 2024 (19:45 - 22:00)

Venue: Hybrid

Saturn's largest moon, Titan, is unique in our solar system. Below Titan's thick organic haze layer, rivers of methane carve channels into an icy bedrock and flow into large hydrocarbon seas. Across the landscape, water ice mountains, and extensive organic sand dune fields are simultaneously alien and reminiscent of Earth.

Titan’s lake-mottled surface and thick, organic-rich atmosphere may be an ideal setting for life as we do not know it and there is certainly much yet to be learned about our own home from the study of Titan.

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Speaker: Dr. Sarah Hörst

Dr. Sarah Hörst is an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore,  in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and an adjunct astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute. Dr. Hörst’s primary research interest is atmospheric chemistry, particularly the complex organic chemistry occurring in the atmosphere or on the surface of bodies in the solar system. Dr. Hörst was a National Science Foundation astronomy and astrophysics postdoctoral fellow at the University of Colorado. She received her Ph.D. from the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona in 2011. She is the winner of the 2020 Laboratory Astrophysics Division Early Career Award and a 2020 Macelwane Medal from the American Geophysical Union.