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 With its enticingly secretive surface blanketed by a dense golden-orange fog, Titan--the largest moon of Saturn--was long regarded as a mysterious, frigid moon-world. However, the Cassini-Huygens mission changed all that when the Huygens lander floated down to the foggy moon's surface in 2004, and gazed at Titan's well-hidden face behind its strange orange mask. Although the Cassini-Huygens mission ended in 2017, planetary scientists are still pouring over the treasure trove of information that it sent back to Earth before it was intentionally destroyed by mission scientists. In October 2019, a team of scientists led by a University of Hawaii (Manoa) chemistry professor and researcher, announced that they have been able to provide answers to important questions about the strange surface of Titan. The researchers say that they have unraveled the origin and chemical composition of Titan's alien dunes. Physical chemist, Dr. Ralf I. Kaiser, and his colleagues, examined remot...

 ur starlit spiral Milky Way Galaxy is literally filled with brave new worlds--distant planets that were born to stars beyond our own Sun. Some of these planetary children of distant stars are similar to the familiar planets dwelling within our own Solar System, while others are genuine "oddballs" that are unlike anything astronomers believed could exist--that is, until they were discovered. Even though the discovery of new exoplanets has become routine, surprising revelations about their often exotic attributes still keep pouring in. In August 2019, a team of astronomers announced that they have gotten a rare sneak peek at the conditions existing on the surface of a distant rocky planet in orbit around another star. The exoplanet very likely has little, if any, atmosphere, according to data from the IRAC camera aboard NASA's infrared Spitzer Space Telescope . This exoplanet study, published in the August 19, 2019 issue of the journal Nature, is just one of a treasure tr...

 The Cosmic Zoo is filled with exotic inhabitants that frequently challenge the limits of the human imagination. Of these strange beasts, black holes certainly rank as some of the most mysterious, as well as enticing, entities. As a result, they have captivated scientists for years with their irresistible Sirens' Song of bewildering secrets. These gravitational monsters do not come in only one size, but so far scientists have clearly recognized only two distinct classes. There are black holes of stellar mass that form when an especially massive star runs out of its necessary supply of hydrogen fuel and blasts itself into oblivion in a core-collapse (Type II) supernova explosion. There are also supermassive black holes that haunt the dark hearts of perhaps every large galaxy in the Universe, including our own Milky Way, and these extremely massive entities weigh-in at an incredible millions to billions of times more than our Sun. In October 2019, a team of astrophysicists announced...