Saturn's Moon Titan & Jupiter's Trojan Asteroids - NASA Animation

"We think of Titan as a real-life laboratory where we can see similar chemistry to that of ancient Earth when life was taking hold here," Melissa Trainer, an astrobiologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, said in a statement. Trainer wasn't involved in either of the new papers, but she is the deputy principal investigator of NASA's Dragonfly mission that will launch to Titan in 2027 and arrive in 2034.

Scientists' fascination with the chemistry of Titan is what makes the new findings so intriguing. Researchers turned the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile toward the moon and spotted the chemical signature of cyclopropenylidene, an awkward triangular compound made of three carbon atoms and two hydrogen atoms.

"Titan is unique in our solar system," Conor Nixon, a planetary scientist at Goddard, said in the same statement. "It has proved to be a treasure trove of new molecules."

Cyclopropenylidene is only the newest of them. But finding it is surprising, the researchers say, because the little-known chemical is pretty friendly: if other compounds are near it, they tend to react, eliminating the cyclopropenylidene signature.

So while scientists have found the compound in the universe, it's usually out in the vast, cold, near-empty areas between star systems — hardly an environment like that of Titan, although the chemical was only found in the moon's thinner upper atmosphere.

The newly spotted compound is also interesting because it is the second chemical found at Titan in which the carbon atoms lock in on each other to build a ring-like backbone. Other chemicals with that type of structure are crucial for the molecules that make up the information-containing part of DNA.

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