Something interesting for Sunday kaheksa: Organic chemistry on Titan and the decay of a ‘God Particle’.

First up, there is some organic chemistry brewing on Saturn’s moon Titan. I will let the scientists at NASA, who undoubtedly know more about the subject than I do, explain it for you:

Artist's concept of a mirror-smooth lake on the surface of Saturn's moon Titan. Image credit: NASA/JPL

PASADENA, Calif. – Two new papers based on data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft scrutinize the complex chemical activity on the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan. While non-biological chemistry offers one possible explanation, some scientists believe these chemical signatures bolster the argument for a primitive, exotic form of life or precursor to life on Titan’s surface. According to one theory put forth by astrobiologists, the signatures fulfill two important conditions necessary for a hypothesized “methane-based life.”

One key finding comes from a paper online now in the journal Icarus that shows hydrogen molecules flowing down through Titan’s atmosphere and disappearing at the surface. Another paper online now in the Journal of Geophysical Research maps hydrocarbons on the Titan surface and finds a lack of acetylene.

This lack of acetylene is important because that chemical would likely be the best energy source for a methane-based life on Titan, said Chris McKay, an astrobiologist at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., who proposed a set of conditions necessary for this kind of methane-based life on Titan in 2005. One interpretation of the acetylene data is that the hydrocarbon is being consumed as food. But McKay said the flow of hydrogen is even more critical because all of their proposed mechanisms involved the consumption of hydrogen.

“We suggested hydrogen consumption because it’s the obvious gas for life to consume on Titan, similar to the way we consume oxygen on Earth,” McKay said. “If these signs do turn out to be a sign of life, it would be doubly exciting because it would represent a second form of life independent from water-based life on Earth…”

The new hydrogen findings are consistent with conditions that could produce an exotic, methane-based life form, but do not definitively prove its existence, said Darrell Strobel, a Cassini interdisciplinary scientist based at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., who authored the paper on hydrogen.

Click here to read the rest at NASA’s website.

And last, a group of particle physicists, composers, software developers and artists known as LHCsound have taken data from the Large Hadron Collider and mapped it to sound files allowing us to “listen to the decay of a ‘God Particle’”.

In the below sample the Higgs “jet is taken apart and reassembled three times, corresponding to the the three sounds you hear (each lasting 20 seconds). In the first case the cells’ dR values are mapped to pitch and then all the cells (notes) are played together. The second sound has pitch determined by distance and the third sound has pitch determined by energy. These are the `harmonic signatures’ of the jet.”

Click here for the complete library of sounds and explanations available from LHCsound or here for the homepage.

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