Researcher has recipe for distant atmosphere

Scientist cooks up gases to mimic conditions on Saturn’s moon Titan

If Sarah Hörst could travel to Saturn’s largest moon to study its atmosphere, she would. Instead, she brought Titan’s gases and dust to her Johns Hopkins University lab.

In a metal canister about the size of a shoe box, Hörst and her team of graduate student researchers created “an atmosphere in a bottle.” A series of tubes pump in gases like those they believe might be found on a distant body, heat them or cool them to the proper temperature and zap them with an electric charge that acts like a burst of charged particles from a star like the sun.

The results, after a series of chemical reactions too complex for them to reliably predict on paper, can be an entirely new combination of gases, production of tiny solid particles suspended in a haze, or even some oxygen and water.

The experiments already have helped them better understand what’s happening on Titan and Pluto, for example. Next, they could offer lessons about worlds that haven’t yet been discovered — and that could host life.

“We’re interested in how atmospheric chemistry affects the habitability of a planet,” Hörst said.

She is helping other planetary scientists prepare for future discoveries by showing them what conditions they might encounter in the atmospheres of distant bodies.

When telescopes give astronomers a

The canister in which Hörst does her experiments zaps the blended gases to mimic the effects of the solar wind.

Hörst holds vials containing tholins that have been created in her experiments. Such particles are formed on Titan.