Pluto Goes Psychedelic in Sensible New Photograph

Pluto’s the prettiest dwarf planet at the party in this new, brilliantly colored image recently released by NASA. It looks like something straight out of the 1960s. Scientists originally thought that the atmosphere creates a bubble almost seven to eight times larger than Pluto itself. The original image was captured by the Ralph/MVIC color camera on NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft as it passed within about 22,000 miles (35,000 kilometers) from Pluto during its flyby in July.

Liquid light shows, which NASA’s image of Pluto is awfully similar to, got started in the mid-1960s with the Progressive music scene. Will Grundy from the New Horizons surface composition team on November 9th presented the image during an AAS (American Astronomical Society) meeting in Maryland.

Since this surface has no proof of age, astronomers are relying on counting the craters on the planet to find how it has changed. He also affirmed that more investigation needs to be done before the newly found object takes away the title of the most distant dwarf planet.

Alan Stern, principal investigator of New Horizons from the Southwest Research Institute (SWRI), said it was interesting and surprising to know that dwarf planets can be active billions of years after their creation and that too in massive scale. During this study it was also discovered that Pluto’s four mini moons seem to be rotating around it in a chaotic way. They are saying that Sputnik Planum can only result from ongoing geologic processes, which require a heat source to take place; smaller heavenly bodies like Pluto usually do not have so much heat. The object called V774104 is smaller than Pluto and is two or three times farther away than Pluto.

“In comparison, a galaxy that Hubble might observe could cover a full arcsecond on the sky, so that’s 20 times larger”. New Horizons spacecraft spotted the two enormous mountains at the southern area of the heart-shaped region on the surface of Pluto.

New Horizons flew less than 12,500 kilometres above the dwarf planet’s frozen surface, providing the most detailed view ever of a Kuiper Belt object.

“Before New Horizons, Pluto was just a pin prick against a starry backdrop”, Lidman said.