New Horizons team reveals fascinating, mysterious Pluto findings in first

Before the flyby it was thought that Pluto might have more than the five moons, but New Horizons conducted “seven deep searches for satellites and rings” in the months leading up to the closest approach. This week scientists summarize their findings in a new paper. “It’s that diversity across this world that just makes it fascinating”. Only 15 percent of the data has been received so far, Stern said.

New Horizons will continue to beam data from the flyby back to Earth through September 2016.

Charon’s coloring is “much more limited than Pluto’s”, but that north polar region is “distinctly red”, the researchers write. And those mountains may contain water-ice.

Previously experts did not have a clear picture of Pluto’s colours.

On April 9, 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft took this photograph of Pluto and Charon from a distance of about 71 million miles (115 million kilometers).

Previous spectroscopic studies of the dwarf planet revealed the presence of nitrogen, carbon monoxide and methane ices.

Instead, water-ice must be present in a sort of bedrock on the planet.

“How such bright surfaces can be maintained on Nix and Hydra over billions of years is puzzling”, the researchers wrote.

A composite of enhanced color images of Pluto (lower right) and Charon.

The information reveals a surprisingly varied terrain: mountains, dunes, cratered areas and ones that are smooth.

The atmosphere-made up mostly of nitrogen, methane and acetylene-that produces those winds is very real but very tentative.

The signature surface feature of the face of Pluto is that white, heart-shaped plain that the team tentatively named Tombaugh Regio, in honor of Clyde Tombaugh, the Lowell Observatory astronomer who discovered the planet in 1930.

Other areas on Pluto seem to be a mishmash of material that is neither bright like Sputnik Planum nor dark like Cthulhu.

Radioactive heat, however, doesn’t explain the mountains at the edge of Sputnik Planum. “We’re not sure of that, but that’s what appears to be happening”, says Summers.

More recently, he has worked with colleagues at Northern Arizona University to grow ices in the compositions he knew he would encounter on Pluto. But the atmosphere is still relatively thick, so nitrogen ices on the surface must be evaporating to make up for the loss. LEISA is a near-infrared spectral imager created to map the surface composition of Pluto and its moons.

Characteristic of glaciers is their ability to slide, slowly. “The nitrogen (N2), carbon monoxide (CO), and methane (CH4) ices that were known from ground-based spectroscopy to dominate Pluto’s visible surface would collapse exceptionally rapidly because they are weak… solids”. But the softer exotic ices would. But Pluto, says Stern, “is out there all by its lonesome”. Those shapes could be caused by glacial flows cracking apart like drying mud, but the team suspects that they are the result of bubbles of convection, like hot lumps rising to the top of oatmeal on the stove. Pluto has no such massive companion, and is probably too small to have held on to the heat of its formation.

Little Pluto and its little neighbours far from the sun are looking more like planets every day.

In the Science paper, the team reports significant regional differences in volatile ices on Pluto’s surface. That color comes from molecules that scatter light in blue wavelengths.

“It raises the question, well, what about Eris and the other dwarf planets as well?”

Those same particles may fall to the surface of Pluto, making the dwarf planet red.

Charon is also heavily cratered like Pluto.

Why is the sky blue?

The New Horizons spacecraft’s historic flyby of Pluto has given scientists a lot of information about the icy world. “Yes”, he said, “but I can’t speak to that because it’s embargoed for a few releases coming soon, and a new wave of papers to be submitted to Science”.

Those gases don’t exist in frozen state on Earth, but on Pluto, with a surface temperature of minus-375 degrees Fahrenheit, they cover much of the planet.

One theory is that the impact happened very early in the history of the solar system, about 4.5 billion years ago, and that the object that crashed into Pluto was between 1600 and 2000 kilometres in size.

This animation combines various observations of Pluto over the course of several decades. The other images show various views of Pluto as seen by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope beginning in the 1990s and NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft in 2015.

Pluto’s large moon, Charon, is providing its own share of surprises.

Pluto was first discovered in 1930 and has since been believed to be peculiar – an oddball in the solar system. It was the first photograph New Horizons sent home after briefly losing communication on July 4. That image was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. “There’s widespread haze to a really high altitude, like a hundred miles above the surface”, Olkin says.