Our Start to Our End: Methane Skies & Black Holes

Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, is a world both alien and familiar. Beneath its thick orange haze lies a dynamic atmosphere, vast methane lakes and a subsurface ocean. Using ground and space-based telescopes, scientists have uncovered how Titan’s hazes shape its climate and whether key organic molecules, similar to prebiotic Earth, hint at conditions for life. In this talk, we’ll explore Titan’s mysteries, from its methane rain to its cryovolcanism, and why this moon pushes the limits of planetary chemistry! Grab a pint and learn why Titan is the most interesting thing in our solar system.

The lifetime of a star can end in a number of spectacular ways, and what remains after a star has imploded can take on a life of its own. Black holes, once a theoretical curiosity, are now understood to be ubiquitous and fundamental to the evolution of the Universe, ranging in mass from a few to a billion times the mass of the Sun. Those we observe with telescopes seem to be intensely restless, but as they are too far away to resolve as images, our best way to understand them today is by trying to simulate the system and gleam understanding from their changing spectra.