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Titan, Saturn's largest moon, could be more hospitable to life than previously thought

Aliens may be more reality than sci-fi fantasy after scientists discovered Saturn's icy moon Titan to be friendlier to life than previously thought.

Saturn - a gas planet nearly ten times wider than Earth - is orbited by a diverse collection of moons, of which Titan is the largest.

At about -180 degrees Celsius Titan's surface is far too cold for liquid water, reports New Scientist.

However researchers proposed in 2005 that alien organisms might live in liquid hydrocarbons found in frozen lakes dotted around the moon's surface.

Nasa scientists suggested such organisms could eat acetylene that falls to the surface after forming in the atmosphere, combining it with hydrogen to gain energy.

Since then dozens of lakes thought to be made of a mixture of liquid ethane and methane have been spotted on Titan's surface.

As no probe has directly sampled them, no one knows how much acetylene they might contain.

However, an updated estimate based on data from the 2005 Cassini-Huygens mission found that acetylene would be hundreds of times more abundant than the previous estimate, making up one part in 100 of the lake's content.

Dirk Schulze-Makuch of Washington State University, who worked on the 2005 mission, told New Scientist the results were "very exciting" and further supported the possibility for life on Titan.

"Titan should be one of the two top targets for future astrobiology missions, the other being Mars," he added.

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