Pluto

[MartinW 0]

The dwarf planet, not the Disney character.

"Bedice" [not bedrock] mountains 11,000 feet high, smooth surface despite being in the vicinity of the Kuiper belt indicating geological activity. Back to the drawing board geophysicists!

First close up images from 12,500km.

3 billion mile, 9 year journey, and images like this...
 
 
 


 

The mountains on Pluto likely formed no more than 100 million years ago -- mere youngsters in a 4.56-billion-year-old solar system. This suggests the close-up region, which covers about one percent of Pluto’s surface, may still be geologically active today.

“This is one of the youngest surfaces we’ve ever seen in the solar system,” said Jeff Moore of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging Team (GGI) at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

Unlike the icy moons of giant planets, Pluto cannot be heated by gravitational interactions with a much larger planetary body. Some other process must be generating the mountainous landscape.

“This may cause us to rethink what powers geological activity on many other icy worlds,” says GGI deputy team leader John Spencer at SwRI.

 

 

[Captain Coffee 2,030]

And if icy planets can be hot inside...does it open up the possibility of microbial life in thermal vents on such worlds, subsurface liquid water.

 

 

Also I am wondering... do tiny Kuiper belt planetoids not get hit very often...maybe they just alter course of incoming objects, but rarely attract them to themselves due to their weak gravity. I am imagining an object heading towards/bumped into our system...it encounters small gravity nudges as it cruises past Kuiper belt objects while the sun and larger planets are doing most of the gravitational attraction...the bits would almost Never come back to smack into Pluto, but keep on trucking towards the larger masses in the center.

As the article says, that New Region is Only 1% of the surface...a Rarely Hit object might have 1% Not Hit??.

 

Just a theory pulled from my Plutar Region.

 

Maybe a heavily cratered Kuiper belt object sighting later in the Horizon mission will squash my theory...or a lightly cratered one might support it.

[MartinW 0]

And if icy planets can be hot inside...does it open up the possibility of microbial life in thermal vents on such worlds, subsurface liquid water.

 

 

 

When we look for life out there, we look for "life as we know it", simply because that's the kind of life we could most easily recognise. There could be other kinds of life that don't require the conditions we deem essential for life to exist.

 

In regrd to "life as we know it" on the surface or Pluto,  we would have to say no. The surface pressure on Pluto is one million to 100,000 times less than on Earth. Also, when Pluto is in Perihelion what atmosphere there is freezes solid. Liquids and gasses on the surface freeze solid too.

 

Inside the planet is a different story, even before the discovery that Pluto may be geologically active, life inside the planet couldn't be rules out. In fact, as a result of the decay of radioactive elements there could even be a liquid water ocean beneath the mantle.

 

 

 Does the fact that we now suspect Pluto is geologically active increase the possibility of life? Don't know, probably.

 

Also I am wondering... do tiny Kuiper belt planetoids not get hit very often...

 

 

On human time scales no, on astronomical time scales yes.  Pluto is 4.5 billion years old. It should have been hit often in terms of astronomical time scales. Therefore the surface would have been remodeled a long time ago on our time scales, recently in terms of astronomical time scales. I did hear an estimate of how long ago it would have been remodeled, but I'm having trouble tracking it down.

 

 

If you look at the image below of Pluto's moon Charon, you can clearly see impact craters. Charon is cratered, Pluto isn't. [According to the data we have at the moment]

 

Interestingly, it seems Charon may be geologically active as well as Pluto, perhaps not quite as much.

 

Personally, in my non expert opinion, Pluto's geological heating is probably a result of the decay of radioactive elements. can't think of anything else it could be. But then my knowledge of such things is minimal. Whats for certain, is that texts books will be rewritten!

 

Another interesting fact, is that Pluto still has an atmosphere, despite being lost to space over 4.5 billion years. Hence there must be some kind of nitrogen supply within the interior. Could be cryo-geysers and volcanoes on the surface.

 

There's a press conference later today, new findings will be announced. 

 

 

 

 

[Andrew Godden 944]

I remember seeing that photo back in July 1969.  Now they are digging up archive photos, digitally enhancing them, and thinking no one will recognise them.

 

The press conference has already been leaked.  They are shots from the far side which couldn't be seen until now.

 

This is what they found.

 

1977.....2015.....It's only taken them 38 years to find it.

 

[needles 1,013]

That's a good looking speaker pod Andrew.

[Andrew Godden 944]

Yeah, but see that band that goes around the middle.....it's a huge equatorial trench and there is a shaft in there that leads to the centre of the planet.  It's an exhaust port venting the gases from the core of the planet.

 

Two proton torpedoes down that exhaust port and it's goodnight Pluto.

 

This is a lower quality image captured from the Hubble Telescope as to what happened in the later stages of the New Horizons mission.

 

 

 

[Quickmarch 488]

Then there's Mars

 

[dodgy-alan 1,587]

It was in the paper, so it must be true!  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunday_Sport#/media/File:Sunday_Sport.jpg

[Christopher Low 63]

It's a shame that Eris wasn't also on the flight path of the New Horizons spacecraft, but that would have been unbelievably lucky! Eris is a lot further from the Sun than Pluto, and a member of what is called the "Scattered Disk" (which is essentially the outer edge of the Kuiper Belt). It is almost the same size as Pluto, and has at least one moon (Dysnomia). Recent measurements of Pluto's diameter by New Horizons indicate that Eris is very slightly smaller, although it is 27% more massive (based on calculations of the respective orbital periods of the moons of both worlds). Eris is currently around 14.5 billion kms from the Sun (almost three times the distance of Pluto), so it would have taken New Horizons a long time to get there anyway....