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Pluto as seen from data taken by New Horizon’s flyby in 2015 of the dwarf planet, with a close-up view of the Pigafetta Montes mountain range. The colorization on the right indicates the concentrations of methane ice, with the highest concentrations at higher elevations in red, decreasing downslope to the lowest concentrations in blue. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI and Ames Research Center/Daniel Rutter ============================================================================= The mountains discovered on Pluto during the New Horizons spacecraft’s flyby of the dwarf planet in 2015 are covered by a blanket of methane ice, creating bright deposits strikingly like the snow-capped mountain chains found on Earth. New...

Uranus, far from Earth in the darker region of the Solar System's planetary reach, isn't alone. It's accompanied by a retinue of moons - 27, to be precise. Far and dim, these moons are difficult to study, but astronomers have made an accidental discovery while observing Uranus. According to infrared images of the five main moons of Uranus, their composition is closer to that of dwarf planets like Pluto and Haumea - compact, rocky objects with an icy crust - than the more fluffy composition of the smaller Uranian moons. Uranus orbits the Sun at an average distance around 20...

A new paper describes how the researchers connected the moving dots to find the new TNOs, and also says this new approach could help look for the hypothetical Planet Nine and other undiscovered worlds. The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is designed to probe the origin of the accelerating universe and help uncover the nature of dark energy by measuring the 14-billion-year history of cosmic expansion with high precision. It studies galaxies and supernovas and precisely tracks their movements. This survey has been active since 2013, using the 4-meter Blanco Telescope located at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile. The...

Day by day, new images appear showing an ever clearer view of a world we inexplicably love. Call it a dwarf planet. Call it a planet. It’s the unknown, and we can’t help but be drawn there. Pluto made history when it was discovered in 1930. In 2015, it’s doing it all over again. Check out the new geology peeping into view.I’m reminded of the early explorers who shoved off in wooden ships in search of land across the water. After a long and often perilous journey, the mists would finally clear and the dark outline of land take form...

A team of astronomers from NASA’s New Horizons mission has unveiled our best look yet at the far side of Pluto, which went unseen to the spacecraft during its historic July 2015 flyby of the dwarf planet. We have only seen one hemisphere of Pluto in high-resolution because the New Horizons flyby of Pluto lasted just hours, whereas the dwarf planet takes 6.4 Earth days to rotate. Thus as New Horizons flew past, one side of the world was illuminated by the Sun, but the other was shrouded in darkness. However, using images taken by the spacecraft while it was...

I’m excited to announce a new chapter in The Buck Sexton Show. Starting today, you can watch me on The First, a new network available for FREE on Pluto TV channel 248. The First is all about free speech and big ideas. It’s a home for people who don’t blindly trust the New York Times, NPR, or CNN — a unique platform for people who are skeptical of the mainstream media and interested in going deeper than the talking points. The First launches today in preview mode so you can get an early look and provide your feedback. Check it...

The researchers suggest that this type of world may a result of large “hot Jupiter” exoplanets migrating toward their host star. Exoplanet surveys have detected several such planets, and it’s believed that they likely formed at a greater distance from their respective stars and then slowly crept inward. When that happens, it’s possible that the change in gravitational forces would prompt large moons to break free from their existing orbits and become standalone worlds of their own. Computer simulations showed that this could indeed happen, and in those cases, the researchers believe we should call them ploonets. Remarkably, our own...

You might not care what Keith Richards or Jimmy Page think about Pluto's status as a dwarf planet, but when Queen guitarist Brian May speaks up about it, it's worth a listen. May, who received his doctorate in astrophysics in 2007, posted his Pluto thoughts on Instagram late Wednesday after hearing about how NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine still thinks of Pluto as a full-on planet. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) tightened up its definition of a planet in 2006 and demoted Pluto to dwarf-planet status, sparking an ongoing debate that just won't rest. May is on the pro-planet side of...

hen NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto in 2015, researchers hoped that its data would help them unravel some of the dwarf planet's mysteries. Instead, the discoveries made during the close-up look at Pluto and its moon Charon revealed more questions that needed answering. One of the big revelations from the flyby was the discovery of an ocean beneath the icy shell encapsulating Pluto. The ice shell was thin in a spot near the equator that's about the size of Texas, known as Sputnik Planitia, which helped researchers notice Pluto's odd topography and suggest the ocean's existence. But this...

Pluto and the Young Solar System by Dr. Lisle | Mar 8, 2019 | Astronomy, Origins | Pluto and the Young Solar System The outer solar system continues to confirm the biblical timescale. When the New Horizons spacecraft flew past the Pluto system in July 2015, its findings challenged secular expectations. In the standard old-universe model, Pluto formed about 4.5 billion years ago. Yet, New Horizons found evidence of a geologically “youthful” surface for both Pluto and its largest moon Charon. A recent study examining the sparse cratering on these worlds provides even additional evidence of their biblical age of...

If you ever find yourself at a cocktail party of astrophysicists and don't know what to say, try this: "But what about the angular momentum?" No matter what the topic of conversation, you'll be guaranteed to sound erudite. Nearly every field of astronomy, from galaxy formation to star formation, has an "angular momentum problem." Nothing in the cosmos ever seems to spin or orbit at the rate it should. The moon is no exception. It is the flywheel to end all flywheels; if its orbital angular momentum were transferred to Earth's axial rotation, our planet would come close to spinning ...

Act Two of the 12-year-old New Horizons mission to Pluto and the solar system’s icy Kuiper Belt is heating up, with less than a month to go before NASA’s piano-sized spacecraft makes history’s farthest-out close encounter with a celestial object. The New Year’s flyby of a mysterious Kuiper Belt object (or objects) known as Ultima Thule (UL-ti-ma THOO-lee) follows up on the mission’s first act, which hit a climax three years ago with a history-making flyby of Pluto. Launched in 2006, New Horizons was never meant to be a one-shot deal. Even before the Pluto flyby, mission managers used the...

University of Arizona scientists have uncovered a curious case of missing asteroids. The main asteroid belt is a zone containing millions of rocky objects between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The scientists find that there ought to be more asteroids there than researchers observe. The missing asteroids may be evidence of an event that took place about 4 billion years ago, when the solar system's giant planets migrated to their present locations. UA planetary sciences graduate student David A. Minton and UA planetary sciences professor Renu Malhotra say missing asteroids is an important piece of evidence to support an...

Many of the primitive bodies wandering the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter are former comets, tossed out of orbit by a brutal ballet between the giant outer planets, said a team of astrophysicists. A commonly accepted theory is that the asteroid belt is the rubble left over from a "proto-planetary disk," the dense ring of gas that surrounds a new-born star. But the orbiting rocks have long been a source of deep curiosity. They are remarkably varied, ranging from mixtures of ice and rock to igneous rocks, which implies they have jumbled origins. The answer to the mystery, according...

Beyond Neptune lies a reservoir of... icy debris left to roam the solar system's dim outer limits having never coalesced into planets... Named for astronomer Gerard Kuiper, who in 1951 predicted the existence of this 3-billion-kilometer-wide swath of icy chunks, the Kuiper belt didn't begin to reveal itself to observers until 1992. Since then, researchers have found more than a thousand bodies filling a doughnut-shaped belt, which extends 30 to about 50 astronomical units from the sun. One astronomical unit is the average distance between the Earth and sun... The puffed-up, elongated orbits and present-day sparseness of the belt all...

Jupiter, the biggest planet in the solar system, might have gained its dominant position after swallowing up a smaller planet, scientists believe. Studies on Jupiter have revealed that the giant planet, which is more than 120 times bigger than the Earth, has an extremely small core that weighs just two to 10 Earth masses. Now scientists have claimed that Jupiter's core might have been vaporised in huge collision with a planet up to ten times the size of Earth, the New Scientist reported. Researchers led by by Shu Lin Li of Peking University in China have modelled what might have...

Boulder, Colo. — Nov. 10, 2011 — Just as an expert chess player sacrifices a piece to protect the queen, the solar system may have given up a giant planet and spared the Earth, according to an article recently published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. "We have all sorts of clues about the early evolution of the solar system," says author Dr. David Nesvorny of the Southwest Research Institute. "They come from the analysis of the trans-Neptunian population of small bodies known as the Kuiper Belt, and from the lunar cratering record." These clues suggest that the orbits of giant...

The path of true love never runs smooth, it is said. Especially on Valentine's Day. And for young planets, that path turns out to be an inward-moving annulus. A simulation by scientists in France and USA appears to show that Jupiter once strayed to flirt with the inner Solar System, before being "jilted" and sent back to its present-day position. The effect of this was to form the inner planets, according to the theory, which comes up with mass ratios for Earth and Mars similar to that observed today and which, remarkably, also accurately depicts the Asteroid Belt. If the...

Line up Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars according to their distance from the sun and you'll see their size distribution is close to symmetrical, with the two largest planets between the two smallest. That would be no coincidence -- if the pattern emerged from a debris ring around the sun. Brad Hansen of the University of California, Los Angeles, built a numerical simulation to explore how a ring of rocky material in the early solar system could have evolved into the planets. He found that two larger planets typically form near the inner and outer edges of the ring, corresponding...

Using the new Combined Array for Research in Millimeter Astronomy (CARMA), Eisner and his colleagues observed more than 250 stars in Orion's central region and found that less than 8% had dust disks thought massive enough to create a Jupiter. The radiation from hot, massive stars in the cluster probably clears out a lot of surrounding material and keeps high-mass disks from forming, explains co-author John Carpenter (Caltech). In all, about 10% of the observed stars emit radiation associated with warm dust disks. The results agree almost perfectly with findings by Geoff Marcy (UC Berkeley) and his colleagues, who conclude...