Titan's Haze Layers in Reflected and Transmitted Light

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy

Scientific paper

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Scientific paper

We present images taken on August 6, 1995 with the Planetary Camera of the Hubble Space Telescope. The images show Titan and its shadow on Saturn. Titan's north-south asymmetry in albedo is clearly visible, with the contrast changing in magnitude and in sign within the observed wavelength range of 340-950 nm. The albedo contrast between north and south varies with center-to-limb position, indicating a different vertical structure in both hemispheres. Titan's shadow yields the extinction optical depth of the haze at altitudes of 200-400 km. The determined variation of the extinction with wavelength indicates that the aerosols in Titan's northern hemisphere are three times larger than in the southern hemisphere (0.3 and 0.1 \mu$m radius, respectively). The transition between the two sizes occurs at low southern latitudes. The best fit to the observations requires fractal-shaped aerosols, not spherical ones. We suspect that we probe different haze layers in both hemispheres. We compare our findings with indications of haze layers from Voyager images taken at the opposite season of Titan.

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