[X] My Assistant

[exoplanet]

My first post a few months ago received no reply. I highly suspect that the "craters" that have been imaged on Titan are most likely volcanic calderas and very, very, active. I have found a photo taken from Gallileo showing similar serpentine channels that are found on Io that are as well found on Titan (only these are lava channels on Io):

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=6859

Curious to know what you all think???

I think that Titan might surprisingly be a very geologically active world. If so, what would be creating the internal heat???

[mike]

I'm not sure if Titan is active or not, but couldn't it be tugged around by Saturn's gravity similarly to how Io is tugged around by Jupiter's?

[dvandorn]

I'm not sure if Titan is active or not, but couldn't it be tugged around by Saturn's gravity similarly to how Io is tugged around by Jupiter's?

Io isn't kept mostly molten by Jupiter's gravity. That honor goes to the tides from the other three large Jovian moons, with Europa and Ganymede providing most of the "flex" that heats Io.

While there are a lot of objects in the Saturn system, there aren't any other moons nearly as large as Titan, so there aren't the massive tides that heat Io so much (and that probably also keep Europa's subsurface ocean liquid).

Titan is overall *very* cold, but cryovolcanism could be happening. So, we very well may be seeing calderas and active volcanism. It's just very *cold* volcanism.

-the other Doug