April 19, 2021 at 6:00 am
Whether they’re made of methane on Saturn’s moon Titan or iron on the exoplanet WASP 76b, alien raindrops behave similarly across the Milky Way. They are always close to the same size, regardless of the liquid they’re made of or the atmosphere they fall in, according to the first generalized physical model of alien rain.
“You can get raindrops out of lots of things,” says planetary scientist Kaitlyn Loftus of Harvard University, who published new equations for what happens to a falling raindrop after it has left a cloud in the April
Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets. Previous studies have looked at rain in specific cases, like the water cycle on Earth or methane rain on Saturn’s moon Titan (