Webb telescope spies clouds beneath the thick haze of Saturn’s moon Titan

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. The Webb telescope observes the universe in infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye — on November 5, the telescope spotted a bright cloud in Titan’s northern hemisphere and, soon after, detected a second cloud in the atmosphere. The larger cloud was located over Titan’s northern polar region near Kraken Mare, the largest known liquid sea of methane on the moon’s surface. NASA/ESA/CSA “Detecting clouds is exciting because it validates long-held predictions from computer models about Titan’s climate, that clouds would form readily in the mid-northern hemisphere during its late summertime when the surface is warmed by the Sun,” cowrote Conor Nixon, a planetary scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, on NASA’s Webb blog. “We had waited for years to use Webb’s infrared vision to study Titan’s atmosphere, including its fascinating weather patterns and gaseous composition, and “Titan’s atmosphere is incredibly interesting, not only due to its methane clouds and storms, but also because of what it can tell us about Titan’s past and future — including whether it always had an atmosphere.