|
Posted on 07/18/2015 6:47:31 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Towering mountains of water ice rise up to 3500 meters tall on Pluto, above smooth plains covered in veneers of nitrogen and methane ice, NASA’s New Horizons team announced today. The discovery, along with the finding that parts of the dwarf planet’s surface are crater-free and therefore relatively young, points to a place that has been geologically reworked in the recent past. “It could even be active today,” said John Spencer, a New Horizons team member at Southwest Research Institute (SWRI) in Boulder, Colorado, at a press conference today at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland.
The team also showed off new images of unexpectedly smooth surfaces on Pluto’s moon Charon—which, without an atmosphere, was expected to have an even more battered surface than Pluto. Radioactive elements in both bodies’ interiors could provide some of the heat needed for geological mountain building or ice flows that repave the surface. But Pluto, and especially Charon, are far too small for this heat to persist. The giant impact thought to have formed the two worlds could also provide a source of energy, but that probably happened billions of years ago.
“It’s going to send a lot of scientists back to the drawing boards,” said Alan Stern, the mission’s principal investigator at SWRI, at the press conference. Scientists outside the team suggest that the puzzlingly youthful surfaces could be explained if the dwarf planet and its moon were formed in a far more recent impact event, or if their reservoirs of water ice were mixed with other compounds that can melt and flow and lower temperatures.
Although the number of TV crews parked outside APL has diminished considerably since the historic flyby on 14 July, the power of Pluto to dazzle continues to grow.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.sciencemag.org ...
You mean....science ISN'T settled? Well knock me over with a feather!!!
Pluto is most likely where the climate deniers are hiding the climate.
It is a good read. But only 9 pages? Cliffhanger.
I never stopped considering Pluto a planet any more than I ever considered homosexual marriage marriage.
Actually, the density of crap out there might be greater, since a load of stuff was/is swept out there by solar wind.
Coolant...
Wait a minute. Methane??? Methane is an evyil hydrocarbon. A fossil fuel even. And we all know methane is caused by evyil cow farts. Who is raising cattle on Pluto? Probably evyil McDonalds clear cut the entire planet for hamburger meat.
SAVE PLUTO!!!
All these oddities in our solar system are going to need a really simple explanation covering all of them. Right now the problems keep multiplying, while explanations become more convoluted and complex.
Easiest explanation to date: Once the solar system had only large gas giants with many moons. Something happened - maybe more than once (400 mya and 200 mya). Now only four remain - Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune. Positions and distributions of the bodies were changed; now all other bodies, no matter their current classification, are simply escaped moons.
Keep in mind that resolution of 4 kilometers per pixel is still going to miss important details
...
We’re going to get higher resolution images in the weeks and months to come.
Charon’s a monster of a big moon compared to Pluto!
...
The Earth’s moon is also considered large compared to the Earth and very close as is Charon to Pluto. Some have said the Earth and Moon should be called a binary planet.
Both systems were probably created by impact events.
Planet looks relatively young... yep just a few wrinkles.
Ok thanks.
Exactly.
Before this mission the temp on Pluto was believed to be near -400. Have they said if they still think that is correct?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
