A Strangely Comforting Finding About Alien Rain
Whether they’re made of iron or quartz, raindrops on other worlds are about the same size as those on Earth.
On rainy days, Kaitlyn Loftus likes to imagine herself somewhere else. Not on a sun-soaked beach, but on another world in the middle of its own rainstorm. Beneath the swirling storms of Jupiter or Saturn’s hazy cloud tops, where helium drops from the sky. On Neptune, where it might drizzle diamonds. Maybe Titan, a moon of Saturn, where methane rain can fill entire lakes.
Loftus is a planetary scientist at Harvard, and for her, otherworldly rain is more than a daydream. She and her colleagues recently studied how liquid droplets might behave as they descend from the clouds of different—rocky surfaces they resemble toffee, puffy atmospheres that might as well be , toasty worlds than most stars.
