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NASA Shares Stunning Image Of Pluto That Shows Its True Colours
NASA explained Pluto’s surface as cracked and cratered, coloured white, tan, and brownish-red
NASA on Saturday shared a stunning image on Instagram taken by its New Horizons spacecraft, showing Pluto’s true colours. The photo, taken at a distance of 22,025 miles (35,445 km) from Pluto, also shows its ‘heart’ -a gigantic glacier made of nitrogen and methane. Pluto’s surface is coated in ice made of water, methane, and nitrogen and is believed to have a rocky core and possibly a deep ocean.
NASA explained Pluto’s surface as cracked and cratered, coloured white, tan, and brownish-red. While the white and tan descend at the top of the photo to meet the brown-red surface, the partially visible “heart” can be seen in white.
The space agency shared the image of Pluto and captioned it as, “Small planetary body Saturday? Taken by our New Horizons spacecraft at a distance of 22,025 miles (35,445 km), this image shows Pluto’s true colors, including the “heart” of the dwarf planet – a Texas-and-Oklahoma-sized glacier made of nitrogen and methane.”
See the picture here:
Orbiting at a distance of 3.7 billion miles (5.9 billion km), New Horizons is the first spacecraft to visit Pluto and is expected to explore the Kuiper Belt – a region that is believed to be full of small objects left over from the creation of our solar system, NASA said.
Pluto was once considered the ninth planet in the solar system, however, it was demoted in 2006 and reclassified as a dwarf planet. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) downgraded the status of Pluto to that of a dwarf planet because it did not meet the three criteria the IAU uses to define a full-sized planet. A “dwarf planet,” as defined by the IAU, is a celestial body in direct orbit of the Sun that is massive enough that its shape is controlled by gravitational forces rather than mechanical forces but has not cleared its neighboring region of other objects.
Pluto is just over 1,400 miles (2250 km) wide, about half the width of the United States or 2/3 the width of the Moon. With its average temperature of -387F (-232C) – Pluto’s surface is coated in ice made of water, methane, and nitrogen and is believed to have a rocky core and possibly a deep ocean.
Another distinct feature on Pluto’s surface is a large heart-shaped region known unofficially as Tombaugh Regio, according to Space.Com. The left side of the region (an area that takes on the shape of an ice cream cone) is covered in carbon monoxide ice. Other variations in the composition of surface materials have been identified within the “heart” of Pluto.
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NASA’s New Horizons probe still exploring, 7 years after Pluto flyby
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto seven years ago, but the probe’s work is far from done.
New Horizons is still on duty in extended mission mode, diving ever deeper into the Kuiper Belt to examine ancient, icy mini-worlds in that vast region beyond the orbit of Neptune.
New Horizons launched in January 2006 and carried out a reconnaissance study of Pluto and its moons in the summer of 2015, culminating in a close flyby of the dwarf planet on July 14, 2015. That encounter revealed Pluto to be an incredibly diverse world, complete with towering water-ice mountains and huge plains of exotic nitrogen ice.
But the nuclear-powered probe kept its eyes open even after Pluto was in the rear-view mirror.
Destination Pluto: NASA’s New Horizons mission in pictures
Primitive object
New Horizons next flew by Arrokoth, a small Kuiper Belt object (KBO), on Jan. 1, 2019. Arrokoth, which the New Horizons science team discovered in 2014 using the Hubble Space Telescope, is the most distant and most primitive object ever explored up close by a spacecraft.
And there could be another flyby in New Horizons’ future as well.
At a meeting of NASA’s Outer Planets Assessment Group (OPAG) in June, New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Colorado, related that both the spacecraft and its scientific payload are entirely healthy. The probe’s lifetime is presently limited only by its nuclear fuel supply, which is likely sufficient to keep New Horizons flying through 2040.
And NASA recently granted another mission extension for New Horizons, which will keep the spacecraft going through 2025.
“I am very excited about this second extended mission,” Stern told Space.com. NASA and the New Horizons team are discussing budget numbers for fiscal year 2025, he added.
Main action items
Now on the New Horizons agenda are a trio of main action items, as approved by NASA. One involves looking for another flyby target “and also more KBOs that we can study, not up close, but in the distance,” Stern said.
In addition, New Horizons is still transmitting the last bytes of data gathered during the Arrokoth flyby in 2019.
“We got delayed in that, mostly because the Deep Space Network had some upgrades. They took antennas down, and one was down for a year,” Stern said. “We’ve got roughly 90% of the Arrokoth flyby [data] on the ground, but we want everything, and that takes time. So that’s a significant activity.”
Then there’s the centerpiece of New Horizons’ second extended mission — a diversity of observations across a variety of fields.
“While we are flying across the Kuiper Belt,” added Stern, “we are going to be doing a very interdisciplinary mission in all the space sciences — astrophysics, planetary science and heliophysics. We’re going to use this spacecraft to do things that really cannot be done except if you have a spacecraft out there. There’s really never been anything like this … We’re doing all three different space sciences by making New Horizons an observatory for all three purposes.”
For example, in heliophysics, the spacecraft will study “pickup ions.” These charged particles dominate the pressure of the outer heliosphere — the huge bubble of magnetic fields and particles that the sun blows around itself — and control where the boundary with the interstellar medium is situated.
In astrophysics, New Horizons will study the cosmic optical and ultraviolet background, getting a nice view beyond the obscuring dust and other scattered light sources of the solar system’s inner regions. New Horizons has already produced the most sensitive measurements of these backgrounds to date, with “deep implications for cosmology,” Stern noted.
In the planetary science column, the probe is slated to study Uranus and Neptune from unique “high phase angle” geometries, shedding light on the important energy balances of those planets.
“There’s never been anything really deeply interdisciplinary like New Horizons is going to become for this next three years in extended mission,” said Stern.
Related: NASA’s New Horizons Pluto spacecraft is still exploring, 50 AU from the sun
Machine learning
The New Horizons team also plans to obtain time on ground-based telescopes such as Keck and Subaru to find new KBOs to study as the probe zips by them, “or if you get lucky and pass one that’s close enough we could get to, we’ll have a close flyby,” Stern said.
The New Horizons team is employing machine learning to hunt for new KBOs using such scopes. “It turns out it is faster, more accurate, more reliable,” said Stern. Weighed against human sleuthing, machine learning “is better and finds more KBOs. So that’s a breakthrough and saves us a lot of work and turns out a better product.”
Ground-based observations have shown that there are different classes of KBOs that have different colors and compositions. “So we know there’s a lot of heterogeneity among the KBOs,” Stern said. “If we had a flyby of a second KBO, I would not expect the same thing at all. It would be a completely different place than Arrokoth.”
Building blocks
KBOs teach scientists about planetesimals, the building blocks of planets thought to exist in protoplanetary disks and debris disks.
The Arrokoth KBO flyby yielded a breakthrough result, Stern said: That at least some planetesimals formed very gently, in a process called a local cloud-collapse phenomenon. The New Horizons team would love to study another KBO up close, to see if its formation and evolution match what was observed at Arrokoth.
“We’re turning this into a machine that does good for astrophysics and heliophysics while it’s doing good for planetary science,” Stern said about New Horizons and its second extended mission. “They are equal partners in science, and that is a first for a planetary science mission.”
Leonard David is author of the book “Moon Rush: The New Space Race,” published by National Geographic in May 2019. A longtime writer for Space.com, David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or on Facebook (opens in new tab).
The Coolest Images Taken by NASA’s New Horizons Spacecraft
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has seen amazing things since it launched over sixteen years ago. It has cruised by Jupiter, peeked at erupting volcanos on Io, and most famously, zipped past Pluto, becoming the first spacecraft to visit a dwarf planet.
The spacecraft is now about 4.3 billion miles (6.9 billion km) from Earth, where it is operating normally and venturing deep into the Kuiper belt at speeds reaching 33,000 miles per hour (53,000 km/hr).
The Pluto flyby, which occurred on July 14, 2015, remains the probe’s crowning achievement. But scientists have taken full advantage of the NASA mission’s journey through the solar system to capture thousands of images of solar system objects. These are our favorites.
What’s it like to be on Venus or Pluto? We studied their sand dunes and found some clues.
This article was originally published at The Conversation. (opens in new tab) The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.
Andrew Gunn (opens in new tab), Lecturer, Monash University
What is it like to be on the surface of Mars or Venus? Or even further afield, such as on Pluto, or Saturn’s moon Titan?
This curiosity has driven advances in space exploration since Sputnik 1 was launched 65 years (opens in new tab) ago. But we’re only beginning to scratch the surface of what is knowable about other planetary bodies in the solar system.
Our new study (opens in new tab), published May 19 in Nature Astronomy, shows how some unlikely candidates — namely sand dunes — can provide insight into what weather and conditions you might experience if you were standing on a far-off planetary body.
Related: Weird ‘blue’ dunes speckle the surface of Mars in NASA photo
What’s in a grain of sand?
English poet William Blake famously wondered (opens in new tab) what it means “to see a world in a grain of sand.”
In our research, we took this quite literally. The idea was to use the mere presence of sand dunes to understand what conditions exist on a world’s surface.
For dunes to even exist, there are a pair of “Goldilocks (opens in new tab)” criteria that must be satisfied. First is a supply of erodible but durable grains. There must also be winds fast enough to make those grains hop across the ground — but not fast enough to carry them high into the atmosphere.
So far, the direct measurement of winds and sediment has only been possible on Earth and Mars. However, we have observed wind-blown sediment features on multiple other bodies (and even comets (opens in new tab)) by satellite. The very presence of such dunes on these bodies implies the Goldilocks conditions are met.
Our work focused on Venus, Earth, Mars, Titan, Triton (Neptune’s largest moon) and Pluto. Unresolved debates about these bodies have gone on for decades.
How do we square the apparent wind-blown features on Triton’s and Pluto’s surfaces with their thin, tenuous atmospheres? Why do we see such prolific sand and dust activity on Mars, despite measuring winds that seem too weak to sustain it?
And does Venus’s thick and stiflingly hot atmosphere move sand in a similar way to how air or water move on Earth?
Furthering the debate
Our study offers predictions for the winds required to move sediment on these bodies, and how easily that sediment would break apart in those winds.
We constructed these predictions by piecing together results from a host of other research papers, and testing them against all the experimental data we could get our hands on.
We then applied the theories to each of the six bodies, drawing on telescope and satellite measurements of variables including gravity, atmospheric composition, surface temperature, and the strength of sediments.
Studies before ours have looked at either the wind speed threshold required to move sand, or the strength of various sediment particles. Our work combined these together — looking at how easily particles could break apart in sand-transporting weather on these bodies.
For example, we know Titan’s equator has sand dunes — but we aren’t sure of what sediment encircles the equator. Is it pure organic haze (opens in new tab) raining down from the atmosphere, or is it mixed with denser ice?
As it turns out, we discovered loose aggregates of organic haze would disintegrate upon collision if they were blown by the winds at Titan’s equator.
This implies Titan’s dunes probably aren’t made of purely organic haze. To build a dune, sediment must be blown around in the wind for a long time (some of Earth’s dune sands are a million years (opens in new tab) old).
We also found wind speeds would have to be excessively fast on Pluto to transport either methane or nitrogen ice (which is what Pluto’s dune sediments were hypothesized to be). This calls into question whether “dunes” on Pluto’s plain, Sputnik Planitia (opens in new tab), are dunes at all.
They may instead be sublimation waves (opens in new tab). These are dune-like landforms made from the sublimation of material, instead of sediment erosion (such as those seen on Mars’s north polar cap).
Our results for Mars suggest more dust is generated from wind-blown sand transport on Mars than on Earth. This suggests our models of the Martian atmosphere may not be effectively capturing Mars’s strong “katabatic” winds, which are cold gusts that blow downhill at night.
Potential for space exploration
This study comes at an interesting stage of space exploration.
For Mars, we have a relative abundance of observations; five space agencies are conducting active missions in orbit, or in situ. Studies such as ours help inform the objectives of these missions, and the paths taken by rovers such as Perseverance (opens in new tab) and Zhurong (opens in new tab).
In the outer reaches of the solar system, Triton has not been observed in detail since the NASA Voyager 2 flyby in 1989. There is currently a mission proposal (opens in new tab) which, if selected, would have a probe launched in 2031 to study Triton, before annihilating itself by flying into Neptune’s atmosphere.
Missions planned to Venus and Titan in the coming decade will revolutionize our understanding of these two. NASA’s Dragonfly (opens in new tab) mission, slated to leave Earth in 2027 and arrive on Titan in 2034, will land an uncrewed helicopter on the moon’s dunes.
Pluto was observed during a 2015 flyby (opens in new tab) by NASA’s ongoing New Horizons mission, but there are no plans to return.
This article is republished from The Conversation (opens in new tab) under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article (opens in new tab).
Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook and Twitter. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.
Browns Rookies Report: From staring at locker to how to wear a helmet – Terry Pluto
BEREA, Ohio – The Browns made some of their rookies available to the media Friday. It’s a fun day, talking to players not long after they walked into an NFL locker room for the first time.
Consider Martin Emerson, a third-round pick and the team’s highest selection last month.
“When did it hit that you are in the NFL?” I asked.
“When I saw my locker,” said the defensive back from Mississippi State. “It was in there with all those other great players.”
Emerson already had been texting with Denzel Ward, the Nordonia product who has become a Pro Bowl cornerback. Emerson played in the SEC, which is like a farm system for the NFL. He made several all-league teams in that conference during his three years in Starkville, Mississippi.
He knew he’d be drafted. But still, seeing your name and your jersey in an NFL locker … it is a dream for many of these young men, a day most will never forget.
Browns rookie Malik Smith has not worn a football helmet since the fifth grade.
Joshua Gunter, cleveland.com
HOW DO YOU WEAR A HELMET?
The Browns brought Malik Smith in for the weekend as a tryout. He is the brother of Tyreke Smith, a star defensive end from Ohio State who was a fifth-round pick by Seattle. Both went to Cleveland Heights.
Malik Smith was a basketball player, averaging 16.5 points and 9.3 rebounds in high school. He was recruited by UNC-Asheville, where he averaged only 1.9 points as a freshman. He later transferred to Bryant and then to Fisk, where he graduated with a business degree. He only played basketball as a freshman.
What about football?
“Not since the fifth grade,” said Smith. “I haven’t worn a helmet since then. They were asking me what size I wanted for shoulder pads and helmet – I don’t know.”
There is a history of a basketball players becoming NFL tight ends. That’s the road the 6-foot-4, 267-pound Smith wants to travel. He was spotted by the Browns at the Ohio State Pro Day. Tyreke fueled the football dream for his brother and convinced the Buckeyes to have Malik be part of the group checked out by scouts.
The Browns like his raw athleticism. He looks in tremendous shape.
“Everything is new to me,” said Smith. “They gave me the playbook and it looks like a bunch of squiggly lines. I got my business degree from Fisk. My brother thinks I can do it. I have to go for it.”
Cleveland Browns RB Jerome Ford also has experience on special teams. Joshua Gunter, cleveland.com
I CAN SMACK ‘EM
Jerome Ford could become more than a reserve running back. I realized that when I asked the Cincinnati product about playing special teams.
“I’ve done it,” he said. “I like it.”
Returning kicks?
“I can do that,” he said. “But I’d rather run down full speed (on kick coverage) and slam into someone standing still. You smack ‘em.”
He laughed.
I remember Kent State product Joshua Cribbs coming into the NFL with same attitude after being an undrafted free agent. Ford began his career at Alabama.
“I walked into the running back room thinking I was going to be the guy,” said Ford.
What happened?
“I looked around and realized I wasn’t going to be the guy,” he said with another laugh.
Like Ohio State, Alabama is an NFL factory. In two years, Ford carried the ball 31 times for Alabama, averaging 4.9 yards and scoring three TDs. That small sample size did show talent. Since Nick Saban became coach, Alabama is usually bubbling over with prime RB prospects.
Ford transferred to Cincinnati (which had recruited him hard in high school) and became a star for the Bearcats. As a junior, he was on the coverage teams along with emerging as a running back. In 2021, he rushed for 1,242 yards (6.2-yard average) and 19 TDs. He became a fifth-round pick by the Browns.
“I was getting a haircut (from a friend) at my house when I got the call I was drafted,” Ford said. “I’ll do anything they want. … I can catch the ball. I was a slot receiver in high school. Special teams … you name it.”
David Bell says the main job of a receiver is to catch the ball, and he did it well at Purdue.
Joshua Gunter, cleveland.com
ANOTHER “CATCH THE BALL” KIND OF RECEIVER?
In 2016, the Browns had a media event like this for their rookies. I spent time with Rashard Higgins. He was a fifth-round pick. He was the fourth receiver drafted by the team that year.
“What kind of receiver are you?” I asked Higgins.
“I’m a Catch-The-Ball kind of receiver,” he said.
At his best, Higgins has good hands. The Browns are hoping third-rounder David Bell has the same traits – even though he doesn’t have ideal NFL speed.
“To me, catching the ball is our No. 1 job,” said Bell, who was the Big Ten Receiver of the Year at Purdue.
Bell’s stats in 2021 are overwhelming. He caught 93 passes, a 13.8-yard average. He had huge games vs. good teams: Ohio State (11 catches, 102 yards), Michigan State (11 catches, 217 yards) and Iowa (11 catches, 240 yards).
With those numbers, you’d expect him to be drafted higher.
“I don’t look at it that way,” said Bell. “God put me in the perfect situation. The Browns have a great running game, a great passing game.”
With Amari Cooper being the only established receiver on the roster, it’s a great opportunity for the 6-foot-2 receiver to play a lot right away.
Rookie Cade York said he has already made a trip to FirstEnergy Stadium to practice kicking on the lakefront.
Joshua Gunter, cleveland.com
YES, HE DID CALL PHIL DAWSON
This was new. I’ve never seen a kicker surrounded by a mob of reporters on the first day the media was allowed to watch rookie camp. But that was the case with Cade York, the LSU kicker drafted in the fourth round.
He already has made a trip to FirstEnergy Stadium to practice kicking on the shores of Lake Erie.
“It was awesome,” York said. “Really, there was more wind when I was usually kicking at LSU.”
York knows bad weather is coming. He had a 40-minute phone conversation with Phil Dawson, the last great Browns kicker. The weather and wind was part of the discussion. Dawson told York of a flag he watched over the stadium to judge the wind currents.
Since the Browns decided not to resign Dawson after the 2012 season, they have cycled through nine kickers in nine years – including Cody Parkey twice (2016, 2020).
Dawson kicked from when the team returned in 1999 until 2012. Some fans want the Browns to hire Dawson as a kicking coach. He already has a job – head football coach at Hyde Park High School in Austin, Texas.
York is quickly learning kickers are a big deal in Cleveland. Dawson is revered. The Browns’ training complex is on Lou Groza Blvd., named after the first great Browns kicker.
Cleveland Browns WR Michael Woods Il flexes as he leaves the field after Cleveland Browns Rookie Minicamp. Joshua Gunter, cleveland.com
YOU CAN DO IT, TOO
“Donovan Peoples-Jones,” said Michael Woods II. The sixth-round draft pick was talking about another sixth-round pick, a receiver just like him. Peoples-Jones (DPJ) was taken in 2020. In his final season at Michigan, DPJ caught 34 passes for a 12.9 yard average.
Woods caught 35 passes for an 11.4 yard average.
Receivers coach Chad O’Shea told Woods how DPJ “played 40 percent of the snaps as a rookie.” Actually, it was 34 percent. But the point being a sixth-round pick doesn’t prevent a rookie from being on the field.
“I’m big,” said the 6-foot-1 Woods. “I’m a 3-level receiver. I can do it short. I can do it medium. I can do it long. … I can block.”
All the rookies were excited. They have run into fans at the airport and the hotel, and they ooze the love for their men in the orange helmets. Everyone is excited right now in Berea.
“Everybody tells me the Dawg Pound is pretty crazy,” said Woods. “We’re gonna give them a reason to be crazy.”
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Pluto wasn’t the first: A brief history of our solar system’s forgotten planets
A kindergartener in 2005 and a kindergartener in 2006 would have learned very different facts about the number of planets in the solar system. 2006, of course, was the year Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet — a move that sparked outrage among a public that tends to romanticize our solar system.
But long before the Pluto “controversy,” other objects moved on and off the official list of solar system planets. Indeed, a kindergartener in the early 1800s would have learned that Ceres was a planet.
So while the argument over planethood might seem like a modern astronomical debate, 19th century astronomers were bedeviled by this of question of how to define what actually counts as a planet.
RELATED: Hubble discovers a Jupiter-like planet forming in a very strange way
And, as alluded to, Ceres predates Pluto in his controversy. The asteroid belt, which sits roughly between Mars and Jupiter, is filled with minor planets and asteroids. One of those celestial bodies, Ceres, has a surface covered in minerals like clay and carbonates, as well as water ice. It is an odd world, to be sure: because it is not completely frozen and is covered in salt water, scientists believe Ceres could harbor microbial life. This place Ceres in stark contrast with Pluto, which is on the far side of the solar system and has an entirely frozen surface. In addition, whereas Ceres is a dull monochromatic gray, Pluto’s colors range from white and black to vivid orange.
Yet Ceres and Pluto have one very important thing in common: Astronomers at one point thought they should be classified as planets, but then changed their mind. It all comes down to size, which in the case of planetary science really does matter.
Flashback to the beginning of the 19th century. An Italian priest and astronomer named Giuseppe Piazzi at the Palermo Observatory had answered a nearly three-decade old question: Why did the orbits of Mars and Jupiter indicate that a planet existed between them even though none could be found? On Jan. 1, 1801, Piazzi seemed to answer this question by announcing that he had found a “star” which had moved from its position in the Taurus constellation. Scientists soon concluded that this must be the missing planet and assumed the matter was resolved.
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Then another “planet” was discovered. On March 28, 1802, German physician and astronomer Heinrich Olbers discovered Pallas; this was rapidly followed by Juno in 1804 and Vesta in 1807. Each was duly designated as a planet, although astronomers began to have their doubts that this increasingly-cumbersome system was working out. Although scientists were given a breather for a few decades, a plethora of new discoveries between 1845 and 1852 left the astronomical community with 15 asteroids to account for. None of the new ones were labeled as planets, but it was becoming increasingly clear that reforms would be necessary. By 1867, it was clear that Ceres was too small to be grouped in with a body like Earth, and so it was given a new designation: Minor planet. And instead of being given fancy names and symbols, they would be labeled with numbers based on when they were discovered or their determination of orbit.
This bring us to Pluto. While Ceres has a diameter of 588 miles (compared to the Earth’s 7918 mile diameter), Pluto has a comparatively heftier diameter of 1477 miles. Yet this did not save Pluto from getting the axe as a planet when the International Astronomical Union met in 2006. The reason was, quite simply, that astronomers had decided that there were three criteria for being considered a planet:
So, the three criteria of the IAU for a full-sized planet are:
It is in orbit around the Sun.
It has sufficient mass to assume hydrostatic equilibrium (a nearly round shape).
It has “cleared the neighborhood” around its orbit.
Because Pluto did not meet the third requirement — it has not “cleared the neighborhood” around its orbit — it lost its status as a planet. Clearing the neighborhood means that the region of space near which it orbits the sun is bereft of larger bodies, having been absorbed into the planet. Ceres, like Pluto, clearly doesn’t pass this criteria: the asteroid belt in which Ceres resides is evidence of a “failed” planet that didn’t clear its neighborhood. Indeed, there are multiple other relatively massive bodies — Vesta, Pallas, and Hygiea — also in Ceres’ vicinity.
Pluto had held this distinction of planet for 76 years, starting with its discovery in 1930 by American astronomer Clyde W. Tombaugh. The demotion of Pluto to dwarf planet remains controversial, and not just among lay astronomers. A team of American scientists published a paper in December in the scientific journal Icarus arguing that a “planet” should be defined as any geologically active celestial body. One co-author argued that we should say there are “probably over 150 planets in our solar system”; the paper claimed that the need to distinguish planets from moons is cultural, not scientific, and hinders proper understanding of astronomy.
“We found that during the 1800s the non-scientific public in the Latin west developed its own folk taxonomy about planets reflecting the concerns of astrology and theology, and that this folk taxonomy eventually affected the scientists,” the scientists explained. They later concluded that “using the geophysical planet concept with subcategories for the individual features (including gravitational dominance) makes the planet concept both useful and deeply insightful for communicating with the public.” This did not happen in 2006, they assert, because “because adequate time was not taken to sort these issues,” with the resulting vote leading to “a deeper split in the community.”
Ironically, even as Pluto was being demoted, Ceres nearly received a promotion. An earlier 21st century proposal for defining a planet would have done so by describing a planet as having enough mass to be nearly round and to orbit around a star without being a satellite of a planet or a star itself. Had this definition been accepted, Ceres would have become the fifth planet from the Sun.
For more Salon articles on astronomy:
Pluto has ice volcanoes like “nothing else” in the Solar System
The biggest known ice volcanoes, which spew ice instead of lava, are located on Pluto. Now it turns out size is not the only feature setting apart Pluto’s “cryovolcanoes” from all others. In a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications, scientists reveal these cryovolcanoes are unlike any features ever seen.
What did the scientists do? — The researchers examined data that NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft collected when it flew by Pluto in 2015. They focused on two volcanoes — Wright Mons and Piccard Mons — analyzing images that revealed details about their structures, and infrared and color scans that shed light on their compositions.
Wright Mons stands about 3.1 miles (5 kilometers) high and spans roughly 93 miles (150 km), similar in size to Mauna Loa in Hawai’i, the largest active volcano on Earth. Piccard Mons is even bigger at about 4.3 miles (7 km) high and 140 miles (225 km) wide. Other known cryovolcanoes pale in comparison — for instance, Doom Mons on Saturn’s moon Titan stands only about 0.9 miles (1.5 km) high and 50 miles (80 km) across.
What did they find? — The cryovolcanoes on Pluto look like nothing else scientists have seen. “The great part of going to a new place in the Solar System is that you always find something new,” study lead author Kelsi Singer, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, tells Inverse. “There is really nothing else in the Solar System that looks like these features.”
The cryovolcanic areas encompass many volcanic domes, with some merging to form larger structures. These suggest that a large amount of mostly water ice — more than 2,400 cubic miles (10,000 cubic km) erupted from multiple sites, likely in more than one event over time.
For example, the flanks of Wright Mons and much of the surrounding terrain are covered in humps 3.7 to 7.4 miles (6 to 12 km) wide on average. These surfaces are unlike what might see from terrains scoured by glacial erosion or carved by volatile ices transforming into vapor — instead, they might have formed from the viscous flow or either slushy or solid but still mobile material.
Other known cryovolcanic features are very different from Pluto’s — either vast flat plains like those on Triton, which might have originated from floods of lava like the lunar mares on Earth’s moon, or a few isolated mountains or domes on places like Ceres, Europa or Titan. “None have the textures like we have found on Pluto,” Singer says.
The unique nature of Pluto’s cryovolcanoes likely results from a special combination of its thin atmosphere, extremely cold temperatures, low gravity, and unique composition. “For example, a fluid like liquid water can remain as water on the surface of Earth because of our higher atmospheric pressure,” Singer says. “But on Pluto, with its thin atmosphere, it is much closer to vacuum-like conditions, so any liquid that reached the surface would both boil and freeze at the same time and would not remain liquid for long. Also, it is easier to build taller features on Pluto because of the lower gravity.”
These cryovolcanoes apparently emerged relatively recently in Pluto’s history. They are covered with few to none of the craters that regularly pepper a planet or moon’s surface from cosmic impacts, suggesting they are at most 1 billion to 2 billion years old, and possibly much younger.
It remains uncertain how Pluto might still possess enough heat for cryovolcanoes to recently erupt on its surface. As a world less than three-quarters as wide as Earth’s moon and less than a fifth of its mass, scientists would have expected it would have cooled off quickly, essentially losing all of the heat it was born with by now.
One possible explanation is that some heat within Pluto might have gotten trapped between thermally insulating layers, like hot coffee kept in a thermos. “Then, if there is a fracture or fault that forms, that could let the heat out all at once,” Singer says.
The discovery of these relatively recent cryovolcanoes on Pluto “will cause us to reevaluate the possibilities for the maintenance of liquid water on small, icy worlds that are far from the Sun, and the active processes that allow for the exchange of water between the surfaces and interiors of these worlds,” Lynnae Quick, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who did not take part in this research, tells Inverse.
All in all, “finding features that are completely unique to Pluto, that appear to be built late in Pluto’s history, tells us that we don’t understand everything about how planetary bodies operate,” Singer says. “Having more examples of volcanic features across the solar system helps us expand our knowledge of what is possible.”
What’s next — Much remains unknown about these cryovolcanoes. “Unfortunately, we don’t have a lot of information about what is happening below the surface of Pluto, and the underground plumbing system is an important part of understanding volcanism anywhere in the solar system,” Singer says. “Getting more information about the subsurface would likely require a Pluto orbiter mission, but sometimes people can come up with creative ways of learning about the subsurface from other observations.”
Besides sending another spacecraft mission to Pluto, future research to learn more about these cryovolcanoes should conduct experiments to understand how the icy materials there behave under Pluto’s conditions. “There is very little work on this, so it is hard to know what numbers to put into the models of how these features might form,” Singer says.
Giant ice volcanoes found on Pluto, hint at possible life
Images of Pluto captured by NASA’s New Horizons mission while on a flyby of the dwarf planet in July 2015 are still yielding new previously unheard-of details and insights about Pluto and its moons.
In 2006 the celestial body was given dwarf planet status by the International Astronomical Union which developed a new definition for planets to which Pluto did not fit. A new analysis of the photos taken on that 2015 mission shows a region on the planet that is bumpy and doesn’t appear to resemble other parts of the small dwarf planet.
Researchers said in their analysis that the region on Pluto is located southwest of Pluto’s “heart” and called “Sputnik Planiti.” It contains “multiple large domes” and the area rises up about 4 miles tall and is about 18 – 60 miles wide with “interconnected hills” and mounds along with depressions that cover the sides and tops of many of the formations and structures.
Kelsi Singer, senior research scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, which is located in Boulder, Colorado said, “We found a field of very large icy volcanoes that look nothing like anything else we have seen in the solar system.”
Volcanic domes on the dwarf planet were studied and the two largest are called Wright Mons and Piccard Mons. Researchers say Wright Mons was determined to be similar in volume to the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii, which is one of the largest on Earth.
Singer said, “The way these features look is very different than any volcanoes across the solar system, either icy examples or rocky volcanoes.”
“They formed as mountains, but there is no caldera at the top, and they have large bumps all over them,” she said. “This means Pluto has more internal heat than we thought it would, which means we don’t fully understand how planetary bodies work.”
The researchers believe the ice volcanoes were formed in multiple different eras or “episodes” and were probably active about 100 million to 200 million years ago, which is considered young in geology.
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