Posted on 08/19/2015 11:44:33 AM PDT by Citizen Zed
Buddy, can you spare 16 seconds? Bjorn Jonsson, a 3D computer graphics expert, used publicly available photos on the New Horizon’s website to create a zippy flyby of Pluto that gets you in and out in just seconds. But hold on! If you use the pause button, you’ll see something amazing — Pluto’s dark backside illuminated by sunlight reflecting off its largest moon Charon.
Even at Pluto’s enormous distance from the sun of over 3 billion miles, enough sunlight falls on its 750-mile-wide moon Charon to provide a faint illumination on one hemisphere of the dwarf planet. The ring you see around Pluto is formed of haze layers, probably methane, in an atmosphere largely made up of nitrogen. And that’s the big question. Since we now know that its atmosphere is continually being lost to space, how does it get replenished?
“More nitrogen has to come from somewhere to resupply both the nitrogen ice that is moving around Pluto’s surface in seasonal cycles, and the nitrogen that is escaping off the top of the atmosphere as the result of heating by ultraviolet light from the Sun,” said Kelsi Singer, a postdoctoral researcher at Southwest Research Institute in a recent press release.
Both Singer and New Horizons principle investigator Alan Stern wonder if comets crashing into the dwarf planet might do the trick. Not only could comets contribute nitrogen, but they could also excavate craters in Pluto’s crust exposing additional nitrogen ice. While both are plausible, calculations show that the amount released wouldn’t be enough to sustain an atmosphere through geologic time. Instead, Stern and company think that geologic activity within Pluto’s crust and mantle may contribute, too.
Pluto’s land forms suggest heat is rising beneath the surface, with troughs of dark matter either collecting, or bubbling up, between flat segments of crust.
“Our pre-flyby prediction, made when we submitted the paper, is that it’s most likely that Pluto is actively resupplying nitrogen from its interior to its surface, possibly meaning the presence of ongoing geysers or cryovolcanism,” said Stern.
As a very direct example of why it is not stable, using only the information from this article... Pluto is losing atmosphere. That atmosphere has mass. What happens to an orbiting body that is constantly losing mass... is that orbit going to be remain stable?
Thing is, NO sane informed theory involves Pluto springing into existence and achieving a tranquil orbit in just 100 human lifespans.
Pluto was discovered 85 years ago and has on a 248-year orbit. It has not even been known to humankind for half a trip around the Sun yet. Calling the orbit “tranquil” is highly speculative - its planetary system sure isn’t tranquil by any stretch of the imagination, it is highly chaotic. We don’t even know for sure whether it is capable of completing one single, full stable orbit; the observational data isn’t there. Heck, we didn’t even know how many moons it had until New Horizons got close to it.
We understand orbital mechanics VERY well. Maybe not perfectly, but enough that Pluto’s orbit is predictable, from what we’ve seen, too well more than 40 revolutions.
It’s predictable in the forward direction but we don’t know how or when it got there in the first place.
We’re smart enough to limit the possible range of how and when it got there. Whatever could have conceivably moved it to its current trajectory within the last ten millennia would have left a whole lot of evidence.
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