"Detection of liquid ethane in Ontario Lacus confirms a long-held idea that lakes and seas filled with methane and ethane exist on Titan," said Larry Soderblom of the U.S. Brown and his team report their results in the July 31 issue of the journal Nature. Brown of the UA's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory said. "This is the first observation that really pins down that Titan has a surface lake filled with liquid," VIMS principal investigator and professor Robert H. The ethane is in liquid solution with methane, nitrogen and other low-molecular weight hydrocarbons.
When VIMS observed the lake, named Ontario Lacus, it detected ethane, a simple hydrocarbon that Titan experts have long been searching for. The visual and infrared mapping spectrometer, or VIMS, an instrument run from The University Arizona, identifies the chemical composition of objects by the way matter reflects light. The lake is about 235 kilometers, or 150 miles, long. Using an instrument on NASA's Cassini orbiter, they discovered that a lake-like feature in the south polar region of Saturn's moon, Titan, is truly wet.
Scientists have confirmed that at least one body in our solar system, other than Earth, has a surface liquid lake.
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