Tiny Pluto sports big mountains, New Horizons finds

[Buster's Uncle]

Tiny Pluto sports big mountains, New Horizons finds
Reuters
By Irene Klotz  5 hours ago



A new close-up image of a region near Pluto's equator reveals a range of youthful mountains rising as high as 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) above the surface of the icy body, in a picture released July 15, 2015. REUTERS/NASA New Horizons/Handout via Reuters



LAUREL, Md. (Reuters) - The first close-up views of Pluto show mountains made of ice and a surprisingly young, crater-free surface, scientists with NASA's New Horizons mission said on Wednesday.

The results are the first since the piano-sized spacecraft capped a 3 billion mile (4.82 billion km), 9-1/2-year-long journey to pass within 7,800 miles (12,550 km) of Pluto on Tuesday.

New Horizons is now heading deeper into the Kuiper Belt, a region of the solar system beyond Neptune that is filled with thousands of Pluto-like ice-and-rock worlds believed to be remnants from the formation of the solar system, some 4.6 billion years ago.

Scientists do not know how Pluto formed such big mountains, the tallest of which juts almost 11,000 feet (3,350 meters) off the ground, nearly as high as the Canadian Rockies.

Another puzzle is why Pluto has such a young face. The icy body, which is smaller than Earth's moon, should be pocked with impact craters, the result of Kuiper Belt rocks and boulders raining down over the eons.



New details of Pluto's largest moon Charon are revealed in this image from New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), taken late on July 13, 2015 from a distance of 289,000 miles (466,000 kilometers). REUTERS/NASA New Horizons/Handout


Instead, New Horizons revealed that the surface of Pluto has somehow been refreshed, activity that may be tied to an underground ocean, ice volcanoes or other geologic phenomenon that gives off heat.

Scientists believe Pluto's mountains likely formed within the last 100 million years, a relative blink compared to the age of the solar system.

New Horizon's first close-up, which covered a patch of ground about 150 miles (241 km) near Pluto's rugged equatorial region, even has scientists wondering if the icy world is still geologically active.

"Pluto has so much diversity. We're seeing so many different features ... there’s nothing like it," New Horizons scientist Cathy Olkin told reporters at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab where the mission control center is located.

Another surprise was Pluto's primary moon, Charon, which was believed to be geologically dead. Instead, New Horizons found troughs, cliffs and giant canyons - all evidence of internal processes.

"Charon just blew our socks off," said Olkin.

So far only a fraction of the thousands of pictures and science measurements collected by New Horizons during its traverse through the Pluto system have been relayed. The data will be transmitted back to Earth over the next 16 months.

"I don't think any one of us could have imagined that it was this good of a toy store," said New Horizons' lead scientist Alan Stern.

(The story was refiled to correct the name of the lab in the ninth paragraph)

(irene.klotz@thomsonreuters.com)


http://news.yahoo.com/tiny-pluto-sports-big-mountains-horizons-finds-223805064.html

[Geo]

Don't tell me everyone on the New Horizon team forgot about tidal effects on a world(let).

[Buster's Uncle]

They must have - though one imagines it's different for two one-face worlds.  Perhaps they expected stable tidal locking for longer than turns out to be the case.

[Unorthodox]

Don't tell me everyone on the New Horizon team forgot about tidal effects on a world(let).

In a fuller coverage of this, they discount tidal forces due to the fact Charon is tidally locked. 

[Buster's Uncle]

...As I surmised...

[Geo]

Don't tell me everyone on the New Horizon team forgot about tidal effects on a world(let).

In a fuller coverage of this, they discount tidal forces due to the fact Charon is tidally locked.

Our Moon is tidally locked towards Earth, but it experiences 'quakes nevertheless. I suppose then the tides causing this happen because there's no perfect tidal lock with Earth because of its elliptical orbit. Is it actually known how 'lighter' elements in a frozen state act upon gravity from a nearby object? Pluto's gravity is weaker then the Moon's, but Pluto and Charon can act upon each other from a way shorter distance then for instance the Moon and Earth.

[Buster's Uncle]

Do we even know how stable the Pluto-Charon tidal lock is now?

My preliminary thought is that Pluto isn't as cold as assumed since always...

[Unorthodox]

Mission scientists do not yet have a convincing theory for how icy objects such as Pluto and Charon, smaller than Earth’s moon and receiving negligible warmth from the sun in the frozen outer reaches of the solar system, can be heated in the absence of large gravitational interactions.

Professor Spencer put forward two possible explanations. One is that radioactive processes, an important source of heat inside large planets such as Earth, can also power activity on far smaller bodies. Another is that Pluto and Charon have somehow retained residual heat from their formation billions of years ago — perhaps in the form of a deep ocean that gradually releases energy as it freezes.

Mission scientists often had to reply “We just don’t know” in response to questions at the media briefing where the first results were released.

I know Pluto doesn't get a TON of heating from the sun, but it DOES heat then freeze, and experience increasing gravitational force from the sun in a cycle with it's orbit.  Could this cause geological activity?  I don't know.  I don't know if we have enough info to really model anything based on pluto's funky orbit. 

[Unorthodox]

Do we even know how stable the Pluto-Charon tidal lock is now?

My preliminary thought is that Pluto isn't as cold as assumed since always...

Reading over the statements, It sounds like theoretically, they just don't have enough gravity between them to cause enough heat to do what we're looking at.  This isn't like a huge planet mucking with a little moon type gravitational forces we've seen in the past. 

[Buster's Uncle]

ANY deviation from perfect tidal lock, and/or stable/circular orbit is going to generate heat, surely.  You could work out how incredibly close they are with the data on their sizes, a ruler, and a large printout of the both in the frame shot that came out last week, assuming that was at maximum extension from the angel of the probe.

It's a 6.something day orbit - close as HECK for bodies of that mass.

[Unorthodox]

Again, I would think any deviation would come from pluto's funky orbit. 

especally with it's what, 120degree axis tilt?  This means the sun would pull unevenly on Charon as it spins around Pluto, ESPECIALLY while they were close and Pluto's getting warm anyway.  Would possibly make for minor variations in that jackhammer speed orbit followed by a period of relative inactivity and cooling. 

[Buster's Uncle]

Making the summer summerier inside.

120 degrees, roughly, yes.

[Unorthodox]

So, it takes pluto 30 years of it's orbit to pass within Neptune's orbit, so let's say 50 ish years of heated activity for sake of easy numbers, then 200 ish years of freezing.  Anyone know how much of that time Pluto's atmosphere is in place?  And, is it all from the SURFACE as originally posited?  Does some of that erupt volcanically, causing the mountains (or did it in the past)? 

Right now it should be either in, or entering into a cooling period as well, so they note we don't see any cryovolcanoes, maybe we're just too late/have to wait another 200 years to see them? 

[Buster's Uncle]

We will never truly begin to know Pluto until we've seen it up close through a full solar pluto-year...

[Geo]

We will never truly begin to know Pluto until we've seen it up close through a full solar pluto-year...

The 3 generations around the time Pluto goes within Neptune's orbit should be sufficient.
No idea how long it takes Pluto's 'atmosphere' to condense after perihelion, but I remember reading NASA (or people within NASA) wanted a probe out there before Pluto's 'atmosphere' disappeared. And we're already half a generation after Pluto went beyond Neptune's orbit again (since 1999).