Away from the darkness of eternal twilight in our solar systems there is a frigid region where our sun can only shine with a weak fire. Here, in this region of ice dancing bodies, there lives a small world with a big heart. Dwarf planet Pluto, inhabitant Kuiper Belt - the home of the growing sea of frozen comet nuclei - since its discovery captured the imagination and affection of humanity. Perhaps this is because it is so far from the Earth and golden, melting the warmth of our brilliant Star. July 14, 2015 by NASA New Horizons the spacecraft finally reached this strange world, surrounded by an unusual quintet of moons, and began to unearth some of the very well-preserved secrets of this icy worldlet. In November 2016, planetary scientists announced that their new research reveals fascinating information about Pluto, indicating that this frozen sphere at the outer borders of our solar system is much more active than anyone ever imagined - and may have underground ocean heart
Indeed, the presence of a liquid ocean deep beneath the icy surface of Pluto is the best explanation for some of the mysterious features revealed New Horizons, according to two new studies. The possibility that Pluto contains a subsurface ocean is not a new idea, but this study provides the most detailed study suggested about its possible main role in the evolution of some important and unexplainable features on Pluto, such as the lowest extensive plain called Sputnik Planitia (Satellite Planum).
Sputnik Planitia is a 1000-kilometer-wide pool located in a large heart shape, observed on the surface of Pluto, and new studies show that it may be in its current location, because the accumulation of ice ice dwarf planet that is, coagulation of Pluto, forming cracks and stresses in the crust, which suggest the possible presence of a liquid subsurface ocean.
Sputnik Planitia which forms one side of Pluto’s famous big heart feature observed in the first New Horizons images mysteriously well aligned with the tidal axis of Pluto. The probability that this is just an accident is only about 5%. Here, the alignment indicates that the additional mass in this particular place interacted with the tidal forces between Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, in order to reorient Pluto. This reorientation Sputnik Planitia directly opposite the side facing Charon. However, the deep pool seems to unilaterally provide the extra mass needed to bring about this particular kind of reorientation.
“This is a big elliptical hole in the ground, so the extra weight must be hiding somewhere on the surface. Francis Nimmo on November 16, 2016 University of California, Santa Cruz press release. Dr. Nimmo is a professor of Earth and planetary sciences at the University of California Santa Cruz and the first author of a new discovery article published in a November 16, 2016 issue of the journal. Nature. The second document presented in the same issue. Nature, led by Mr. James Kean at the University of Arizona at Tucson, also suggests this reorientation and points to fractures on Pluto as evidence that this has happened.
Dancing in the dark
Where Pluto is deep-frozen in our solar system, our sun appears in its dark sky, as if it were just a big star floating around in a strange sea of starlight. Mystery tickles imagination, and Pluto has been an intriguing mystery for almost a century. Pluto remained unchanged as long as New Horizons the spacecraft successfully completed its historic closest approach to Pluto, about 7,750 miles above its secretive surface - at about the same distance as Mumbai, India to New York - making it the first space mission to finally explore this bold new world from Earth.
Pluto, Charon and the other four relatively small moons belonging to the Pluto system, located in the frigid Kuiper Belt - a dimly lit and remote domain behind a beautiful dark blue glacier planet Neptune, the most distant of the eight major planets orbiting our Sun. In this previously unknown and unexplored region of our solar system, the dazzling and icy host of a tiny worldlets make a fascinating ballet around our distant Star. Pluto - significantly large Kuiper Belt , and it was originally classified as the tenth major planet of our Sun shortly after its discovery in 1930. However, a better understanding of the true nature Kuiper belt, and its heavy population of ice dwellers forced astronomers to come to the realization that Pluto — the beloved, frozen, little “freak” —is just one of at least a few large dwellers Kuiper belt. it International Astronomical Union (IAU) formally define the term "planet" in 2006 - and, as a result, poor Pluto was unceremoniously loaded from the pantheon of the large planets and reclassified as simple dwarf planet - in particular, ice dwarf because of its frozen nature. However, Pluto is still a little world of mystery and affection — and debate, because its reclassification is ice dwarf not common among astronomers.
The Pluto saga began when the son of a young farmer from Kansas, the astronomer Clyde Tombo (1906-1997), endowed him with the difficult task of hunting for elusive and potentially non-existent Planet X. According to the theory Planet X - This is an elusive giant planet that keeps well hidden from curious astronomers, where it hides in the cold twilight zone of the outer boundary of our solar system. Tombaugh, who used a telescope in Flagstaff, Arizona, did find a faint tiny point of light. However, in one of the many examples of scientific intuition, Tombo did not find what he was looking for. He found something else. That Tombo was found was not Planet X It was a small world, now known as Pluto!
Like the others Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) , Pluto is mainly composed of ice and stone. A small world, occupying only about 1/6 of the Earth’s mass and about 1/3 of its volume, Pluto demonstrates a strongly inclined and eccentric orbit, which takes from 30 to 49 astronomical units (speakers) from our sun. One AU equivalent to the average distance between our Earth and the Sun, which is about 93,000,000 miles. Pluto periodically wanders towards our Star at a closer distance from Neptune. However, luck prevails, and the orbital resonance with Neptune prevents two worlds from exploding with each other with catastrophic results.
Kuiper Belt very far from us, rotating around our Sun far beyond the realm of the four majestic gas outer planets. belt itself extends from the orbit of Neptune to about 50 AU. Neptune’s average distance from our Sun is about 30.1 AU --him perihelion (when it is closest to our Star) is 29.8 AU , And his aphelion (when it is farther from our Star) is 30.4 AU
ice dwarf Pluto was named after the Roman god of the underworld. Pluto's biggest moon, Charon, was discovered in 1978 by American astronomer James Christie. Some astronomers have suggested that Charon is indeed a terrible piece of Pluto. According to this theory, Charon was once part of Pluto, which was blown up as a result of a strong collision between Pluto and some unidentified little world that made a destructive ramp through the Kuiper belt. The confusion occurred when the doomed object met with Pluto and crashed into it. Charon is the result of this ancient clash.
For most of the 20th century, astronomers believed that Pluto was a small, small world located in the cold outer borders of our solar system. However in 1992 KBO (except for Pluto and Charon), and astronomers came to the realization that Pluto is far from alone. The realization that Pluto is another component of the insane crowd of ice CCD, ruled in its distance from the pantheon of the major planets and its reclassification as ice dwarf.
Launched on January 19, 2006, New Horizons successfully completed the five-month reconnaissance flight system of Pluto and is now sent to our frozen strips of the solar system to explore the more distant small worlds inhabiting Kuiper belt, as part of his extended mission. New Horizons will help shed new light on the mysterious and very remote worldlets lingering in the deep freeze of our solar system. Kuiper Belt in fact, it is a lingering relic of the ancient birth of our solar system, and the population of frozen objects remaining there has retained in its frozen hearts some very important long-lost secrets of its past. New Horizons promises an unforgettable amazing story about the origin of our Sun and its family of objects.
Pluto: Secrets of the Heart
Like other large pools of our solar system, "Sputnik Paying" as a rule, it is formed as a result of the catastrophic effect of a large meteorite that would destroy a huge amount of Pluto’s ice crust If the subsurface ocean were present, it would lead to a rise in water, pushing towards a weak, thin and fragile ice crust. Since water is denser than ice in equilibrium, it will still leave a rather deep pool with a thin crust of ice covering the upstream mass of water.
“At this moment there is no additional mass in Satellite Planitia. What happens when the ice shell becomes cold and strong, and the pools are filled with nitrogen ice. Nimmo explained on November 16, 2016 Press Release UC Santa Cruz.
Dr. Nimmo and his team also looked at what additional mass could be provided only by a deep crater filled with nitrogen ice, in the absence of upwelling of the subsurface ocean. However, their calculations showed that this particular scenario would require an unrealistically deep layer of nitrogen - thickness over 25 miles! Astronomers have found that a layer of nitrogen about 4 miles thick covering the subterranean ocean provides enough mass to form a “positive gravity anomaly”.
“We tried to come up with other ways to get a positive anomaly of aggression, and none of them looks as sensible as the subterranean ocean,” continued Dr. Nimmo.
Dr. Douglas Hamilton, who is from the University of Maryland at College Park, and co-authored the study, formulated a reorientation scenario, and Dr. Nimmo came up with a hypothesis about the subterranean ocean. The hypothesis of the subsurface ocean suggests a scenario similar to what happened on the Moon of the Earth, where earlier positive gravity anomalies were measured for several large impact basins. However, instead of the subsurface ocean, the dense mantle material, hidden under the lunar crust, is pushed towards the thin crust of the shock basins. Lava flows then poured upward and flooded the pools, therefore providing additional mass. However, Ice Pluto experienced such a scenario with a different ingredient. Instead of lava, the pool on Pluto is filled with frozen nitrogen.
“There is a lot of nitrogen in Pluto’s atmosphere, and it either freezes in this low basin, or it freezes in the high regions surrounding the basins and flows down like glaciers,” Dr. Nimmo said in Press Release UC Santa Cruz. Indeed, the images obtained from New Horizons reveal what appears to be nitrogen glaciers flowing from the highlands surrounding the Satellite Planitia.
Regarding the subterranean ocean, Dr. Nimmo added that he suspects that it consists mainly of water with some unidentified antifreeze added to the mixture, which is likely to be ammonia. Slow freezing of the ocean can cause stress in the ice shell. This stress causes fractures that are consistent with the features observed in New Horizons images.
Pluto is not alone where he is in Kuiper belt. There are other large related bodies lying in Kuiper Belt that Pluto’s similarity is in size and density, and Dr. Nimmo noted that these other objects probably also contain subsurface oceans. “When we look at these other objects, they can be equally interesting, and not just frozen snowballs,” he added.
In the second study, which also appeared in the issue of the journal on November 17, 2016 Nature Dr. Isamu Matsuyama and his doctoral student James Keen from the University of Arizona Moon and Planetary Laboratory cite data on frozen nitrogen clusters, which displace all of Pluto from roasting, in a process called true polar wandering. This was compared to spinning with a stick of chewing gum glued to it.
“There are two ways to change the rotation of the planet: the first - and all of them were most familiar - is a change in the inclination of the planet, where the axis of rotation of the planet is reoriented relative to the rest of the solar system. Second way true polar wanderer where the spin axis remains stationary relative to the rest of the solar system, but its reorientation is beneficial, ”Mr. Keen explained on November 16, 2016. University of Arizona press release.
Planets usually rotate to minimize energy. This means that the planets tend to reorient themselves in order to move the extra mass closer to the equator, moving any mass deficit closer to the pole. To visualize this, if a large volcano were to grow in San Francisco, our planet would reorient itself to move San Francisco to the Earth's equatorium.
But, to visualize how polar wandering works on Pluto, you first need to realize that unlike the Earth, the axis of rotation of which is slightly tilted, so that the areas around the equator are endowed with most of the sunlight, Pluto is more like a "rotating top that lies on its side". It means that dwarf planet the poles get most of the sunlight. Depending on the season, this is either one or the other. In addition, the equatorial regions of Pluto all the time remain extremely frigid.
Pluto is almost 40 times farther from our Star than from Earth. This means that in order to complete one Pluto year, a distant ice world is required 248 Earth-years. At low latitudes in Pluto, close to the equator, the temperature is bitterly cold at minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit. At this almost unimaginably cold temperature, nitrogen is converted into a frozen solid.
Nitrogen and other exotic gases, during the Pluto period, are condensed on its dark side, which is stored in eternal shadow. Sometimes, when Pluto revolves around our Sun, our Star flame temperature causes nitrogen and other substances to become gaseous again and condense again on the other side of the little world. This leads to seasonal "snowfall" on Satellite Planitia.
“Every time Pluto goes around the Sun, a little nitrogen accumulates in the heart, and as soon as enough ice accumulates, maybe a hundred meters, it starts to overstep the shape of the planet, which dictates the orientation of the planet, the excess mass in one place on the planet wants to go to the equator. Keen said on November 16, 2016 University of Arizona press release.
“I think that this idea that the entire planet is dragging around riding bats is not something that many people really thought about,” Mr. Keen added.
Researchers at the University of Arizona used observations made during New Horizons and combined them with supercomputer models that allowed them to use a surface function, such as Sputnik Planitia , slide it to the surface of Pluto and watch how it changes ice dwarf axis of rotation.
As a result, in computer models the geographical location Sputnik Planitia intriguingly close to where one would expect this.
If Sputnik Planitia there was a large positive mass anomaly — perhaps as a result of loading nitrogen ice — it would migrate to the tidal axis of Pluto with respect to Charon, as it approaches the minimum energy state. Therefore, massive ice buildup will end where it will cause the smallest oscillation in the axis of rotation of Pluto.
In addition, the simulation and calculations of supercomputers suggested that the accumulation of frozen volatile substances in the large heart of Pluto will lead to the formation of cracks and faults on the surface of the planet in exactly the same places where New Horizons noticed them.
The presence of tectonic faults on Pluto implies the existence of a subsurface ocean at some point in the history of Pluto, Mr. Keen noted. He added that “before New Horizons , people usually think only of volatile substances from the point of view of fine flax veneer, a surface effect that can change color or affect local or regional geology. to have a dramatic, planetary effect is not something that anyone could predict. "
