Pluto Stuns Scientists with Startling Complexity with New Horizons Data

Pluto shows no significant flattening, at the poles, indicating no evidence “of an early, high-spin period after Pluto-Charon binary formation”, Stern concludes, “presumably because it was warm and deformable during or after tidal spindown”.

“It’s a vigorous and diverse world that is active today”, said William McKinnon, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at Washington University in St. Louis and deputy lead for the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team.

“We practiced and trained so hard, but when we analyzed images from the New Horizons spacecraft during its approach, we didn’t find any new moons, rings or debris orbiting Pluto”, said Hamilton.

“It’s like a little bit of everything”, says Carly Howett, a planetary scientist and New Horizons team member at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “Either they were never coated, or the lighter ices slide off”. But for geologists, Tombaugh Regio has a lot more to it than sentiment.

There is a large area named Sputnik Planum hundreds of miles across that is devoid of craters. But the researchers say that explanation does not work for Pluto.

That would only be possible if Pluto had a source of heat other than the Sun, whose energy at a distance of about three billion miles is vanishingly feeble. But Pluto, says Stern, “is out there all by its lonesome”. Something else must be going on with Pluto, whose orbital dance with Charon produces no such internal to-and-fro.

Pluto’s small moons Nix (left) in enhanced colour and Hydra are covered by the ice we’re most familiar with – frozen water.

Sputnik Planum, a shiny plain of icy flows, might be the answer: a gateway between the atmosphere and the lukewarm hell of the core. As Pluto moves away from the Sun in its 248-year elliptical orbit, temperatures plummet and these compounds freeze out of the atmosphere and fall onto the surface as frost.

That happened in 1989. The observations suggest that frozen H2O forms a layer of solid “bedrock” that’s only occasionally exposed at the surface.

“The New Horizons encounter with the Pluto system revealed a wide variety of geological activity-broadly taken to include glaciological and surface-atmosphere interactions as well as impact, tectonic, cryovolcanic, and mass-wasting processes – on both the planet and its large satellite Charon”. “The question is, what is causing those shapes”, says Olkin. “If so, it’s very sudden”. We now know the sizes of Pluto and Charon much more accurately, and it turns out that they share similar densities and so may be composed of the same stuff.

The truth might be out there.

New Horizons is still in the process of sending data from its flyby back to Earth, a process that will take almost another year.

Pluto’s range of colour and brightness is highly varied.. A few of this might result from ice subliming from the surface during Pluto’s seasons-which result from an eccentric orbit carrying it periodically closer to and further from the Sunday. However, Protopapa and her colleagues do not yet understand the relationship between water ice and tholins on Pluto’s surface. Like Iapetus, it has stunningly bright terrain juxtaposed with dark areas. The reflective properties of Nix indicate that the small moon is likely covered in water ice.

The surface of Pluto is marked by plains, troughs and peaks that appear to have been carved out by geological processes that have been active for a very long period and continue to the present, a new study says.

In 2010, an analysis of Hubble images revealed a mottled world of orange, white, and black. 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.

Lastly, Pluto is sweetly colorful. The pair are gravitationally bound to one another, and might even swap atmospheric gases.

Careful measurements show that Pluto is 2,374 kilometers or 1,475 miles in diameter, a little smaller than what was previously thought. This report incorporates comments that Stern made at last week’s ScienceWriters2015 meeting in Cambridge, Mass. Alan Boyle is the president of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, one of the organizers of the New Horizons in Science briefings at ScienceWriters2015.

Snapped July 8, 2015, this portrait shows the contrasting colors of Pluto (right) and its moon Charon.

“It’s not actually clear that Pluto and Charon are that different in terms of their bulk composition, so it kind of changes the boundary conditions of the giant-impact model”, McKinnon said. What do you see?

“When we get done, there will be people clamoring for an oribter to Pluto”. Sykes reviewed the research paper in advance but is not part of the New Horizons team. The color image has been combined with lower-resolution color information from the Ralph instrument that was acquired earlier on July 13. The “heart” reveals a smooth face, suggesting that ongoing geologic processes may keep it wiped clean.