Posted on 10/08/2015 11:20:25 AM PDT by Red Badger
NASA has discovered frozen water and earth-like blue skies on Pluto in another historic development in the search for extraterrestrial life.
Just 10 days after confirming that liquid water has been found on Mars, the US space agency revealed the amazing dwarf-planet has both ice and a 'gorgeous' blue sky.
A Nasa spokesman said: "New Horizons has detected numerous small, exposed regions of water ice on Pluto.
"The discovery was made from data collected by the Ralph spectral composition mapper on New Horizons."
There has been repeated speculation Pluto may have a liquid sea under its surface, and confirmation of water ice on the surface adds to this theory.
Amazingly, much of the frozen ice has been found in a deep crack running from an interesting crater on Pluto first highlighted to Nasa by Express.co.uk as a potentially interesting feature back in July when images first beamed back.
At the time New Horizons planetary scientist David Grinspoon said it could be an eroded asteroid or comet impact crater and tectonic lines, hinting that the dwarf planet may still be geologically active.
Pluto’s haze layer shows its blue color in this picture taken by the New Horizons [EPA]
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Now Nasa has informally named the distinctive crater that appears to have a peak and a letter C shape within it the Eliott Crater and the faults running away from it Virgil Fossa.
A new image released today shows a 280 miles across section showing hwere water was found.
A spokesman said: "The strongest signatures of water ice occur along Virgil Fossa, just west of Elliot crater on the left side of the inset image, and also in Viking Terra near the top of the frame.
"A major outcrop also occurs in Baré Montes towards the right of the image, along with numerous much smaller outcrops, mostly associated with impact craters and valleys between mountains."
Alan Stern, Nasa New Horizons principal investigator, from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado, said: "Who would have expected a blue sky in the Kuiper Belt? It’s gorgeous.”
The haze particles themselves are likely grey or red, but the way they scatter blue light has drawn the attention of the New Horizons science team.
I have that book (somewhere)! Loved it when I was a kid. I had three similar “coffee-table” astronomy books, all pre-Hubble, and looking at them now they seem so drab and uninformative (not to mention all the obsolete facts due to Science Marches On).
Maybe not life "as we know it" in your basement or somewhere. But stuff has been growing on the outside of the ISS - why not in liquid water (from compression warming) deep inside a tectonic crack on Pluto?
The entire universe is fine tuned for life as we know it. It's so improbable that science can't explain it based on chance alone and so have had to come up with the idea of an infinite number of multiverses to justify the existence of the uniqueness of our universe.
Have never understood why anyone would think the existence of life beyond this infinitesimally small speck in the vastness of space would do anything but magnify the grandeur of God. It would mean the spirit that animates living things is universal, in a literal sense.
Because there thousands of other factors that have to be satisfied that just aren't there. If stuff is growing on the ISS it's only because it came from earth. Any kind of life is incredibly complex and requires specific processes to survive...let alone come into being.
What I find surprising is how emotionally invested NASA scientists are in finding life. I guess it helps their funding.
But what if there isn’t life out there?
In this vast universe we may be alone.
That is what would be mind blowing.
Here the petition to promote Pluto back to planetary status…
Remember you are not just helping Pluto but if it was promoted it would be a stick in the eye of atheist activist Neil Tyson’s who played a big role in demoting it.
https://www.change.org/p/international-astronomical-union-declare-pluto-a-planet-plutoflyby
Take the giraffe. It has a long neck but also has an incredible vascular system that was specially designed to compensate for the fact that blood has to make it all the way up its neck defying gravity. Something only a designer would be able to figure out and construct.
Yes, many years ago leaving Chicago.
Tromso, Norway in February was better since there wasn’t much wind to speak of.
Gamelons.
Stop. Please stop. There is no water anywhere but here. And we are going nowhere but here. That is reality. Deal with it.
A) How could we possibly know that given so many unanswered questions about life in just our own solar system & the fact we have not (yet) ventured beyond our own solar system in a quest for life?
B) "Life was we know it" may be just one in numerous forms of life. Given billions of galaxies & trillions of stars, my guess is we have an extremely small notion of what exactly life is and how it exists throughout the Universe.
The quest for other life or additional life is barely in its infancy.
Pluto is really upset about its demotion and wants everyone to know why it deserves back into the Bigs.
Google "universe fine tuned for life" or "earth fine tuned for life". Eye opening.
You don’t have adequate information on “other factors” and “specific processes” to make an intelligent case about them. We only now have orbital photos of Pluto and know next to nothing about the biochemistry and electrical potentials on the surface, much less deep within a geological fissure. Entirely new processes that support life might be found there as on other objects in the solar system.
Besides, a strong argument can be made that microbial life can be spread throughout a solar system from the place it originally evolved via asteroid impacts and debris.
That's been disproven in several places in just our own solar system. Heck, there's water on Earth's moon.
“But stuff has been growing on the outside of the ISS...”
No, I don’t think so. A few microorganisms were able to survive for a while outside the capsule, but only in a state of hibernation, so they weren’t growing.
I didn't post them but the conditions needed for life to exist are available among the billions of internet pages. There's many intelligent cases made.
And only 32 pixels!
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