Let's Go Skating on This Frozen Pluto Lake

[Buster's Uncle]

Let's Go Skating on This Frozen Pluto Lake
Popular Mechanics
By John Wenz  25 minutes ago



​​NASA's New Horizons team thinks it's found a frozen lake on the icy surface of Pluto.​



There's plenty of water to go around in the solar system, but standing lakes are a different thing. So far, we know only of Earth's bodies of water and the methane lakes on Saturn's moon Titan, though Mars likely had lakes at one point. Now, NASA researchers working on the New Horizons mission think they've found a frozen lake in a faraway place.

Just north of Pluto's most distinctive feature, the heart-shaped Sputnik Planum, an icy structure sits among some old bedrock ice. The lake is likely made of liquid nitrogen, and may come back to life-but that will only happen maybe every 800,000 years. Because of Pluto's lengthy orbit (it takes 248 Earth years to go around the sun) and its odd tilt, the lake hits the sun just right every million years, give or take a few hundred thousand.

This lake also is part of a larger body of evidence that Pluto may have once had a surface with rivers, lakes, and reservoirs now confined to Sputnik Planum. It also shows a world of dynamic geology that seems to return dozens of questions for every answer with each new data dump.


http://news.yahoo.com/lets-skating-frozen-pluto-lake-163739561.html