{"id":15937,"date":"2015-11-09T19:59:00","date_gmt":"2015-11-09T11:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/weird-mountains-on-pluto-may-be-ice-volcanoes\/"},"modified":"2015-11-09T19:59:00","modified_gmt":"2015-11-09T11:59:00","slug":"weird-mountains-on-pluto-may-be-ice-volcanoes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/weird-mountains-on-pluto-may-be-ice-volcanoes\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Weird\u2019 mountains on Pluto may be ice volcanoes"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The
The informally named feature Wright Mons, located south of Sputnik Planum on Pluto, is an unusual feature that\u2019s about 100 miles (160 kilometers) wide and 13,000 feet (4 kilometers) high. It displays a summit depression (visible in the center of the image) that\u2019s approximately 35 miles (56 kilometers) across, with a distinctive hummocky texture on its sides. The rim of the summit depression also shows concentric fracturing. New Horizons scientists believe that this mountain and another, Piccard Mons, could have been formed by the \u2018cryovolcanic\u2019 eruption of ices from beneath Pluto\u2019s surface. Credit: NASA\/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory\/Southwest Research Institute<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Maps of Pluto charted using data from NASA\u2019s New Horizons mission appear to show two huge mountains scientists said Monday could be ice volcanoes, a discovery that would set the distant dwarf planet apart from its neighbors in the outer solar system.<\/p>\n

Two sprawling mountain peaks, each about 100 miles across and several miles high, have deep depressions carved from their centers, a telltale marker of a volcano, at least on more familiar geologically active worlds closer to the sun.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhatever they are, they\u2019re definitely weird, and volcanoes is maybe the least weird hypothesis at the moment,\u201d said Oliver White, a scientist on the New horizons team from NASA\u2019s Ames Research Center.<\/p>\n

But Pluto itself is an enigma.<\/p>\n

Geologists did not expect to see apparent glacial ice flows, and scientists are making unexpected findings about Pluto\u2019s tenuous atmosphere. With the discovery that Pluto is geologically alive, more signs are pointing toward the presence of volcanic activity.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m having difficulty unseeing volcanoes,\u201d White said Monday. \u201cAs somebody who did his Ph.D in volcanic morphology, when you see a big mountain with a hole on the top, it generally points to one thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

In their faraway perch 3 billion miles from the sun, Pluto and Charon, the largest of its five moons, are locked in an orbital dance, each presenting the same face to its companion during every 6.4-day cycle.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s just astounding that in all of the exploration that we\u2019ve done, that the nearest neighbor analogy to these constructs occurs on Mars,\u201d said Alan Stern, New Horizons\u2019 principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute. \u201cYou have to look to the other red planet to find something similar. Across all the worlds of the middle solar system, we\u2019ve seen nothing like this. It\u2019s truly amazing. It\u2019s like something on a terrestrial planet.\u201d<\/p>\n

If the two mountains highlighted by White, informally dubbed Wright Mons and Piccard Mons, are actually volcanoes \u2014 whether active or extinct \u2014 their output is not molten rock but a slurry of water ice, nitrogen, ammonia, or methane, scientists said.<\/p>\n

\"This
This slide presented by Oliver White during Monday\u2019s press briefing at the American Astronomical Society\u2019s Division for Planetary Sciences meeting shows visual and topographic relief maps of the informally named Wright Mons and Piccard Mons. Credit: NASA\/JHUAPL\/SWRI\/AAS\/Oliver White<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Using three-dimensional maps created with stereo imagery captured by New Horizons on its July 14 flyby of Pluto, geologists estimate Wright Mons is 13,000 feet high \u2014 about 4 kilometers \u2014 while nearby Piccard Mons looms even taller.<\/p>\n

The geometry of New Horizons\u2019 encounter with Pluto put both mountains in twilight, with the insides of their central pits in darkness.<\/p>\n

The announcement Monday bolsters evidence that Pluto harbors a liquid ocean deep underneath its outer shell of ice. Measurements show Pluto\u2019s icy crust is mainly made of frozen nitrogen, methane and carbon monoxide, volatile species with super-cold melting points.<\/p>\n

Scientists believe the ices are energized from a meager heat source buried inside Pluto\u2019s core emitting warmth from the natural radioactive decay of elements cocooned inside the dwarf planet at its formation during the dawn of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago.<\/p>\n

The immense tug of gravity from Jupiter and Saturn pulls on their moons, a force known as tidal heating that deforms the interiors of moons like Io and Enceladus, triggering their famous eruptions of lava and icy plumes.<\/p>\n

Pluto has no such nearby giant to mush its insides and give rise to volcanoes.<\/p>\n

\u201cAn internal radioactive heat source is, at the moment, the only heat source that we can really think of given that tidal heating has probably not had much effect on Pluto,\u201d White said. \u201cPluto is very small. It would have a silicate core, and the heat source may have died off quite a bit over the 4.5 billion years over Pluto\u2019s existence.\u201d<\/p>\n

While there\u2019s maybe less heat to go around (than on planets in the inner solar system), perhaps you get more bang for your buck with the heat that is available given the nature of these ices that are on the surface,\u201d White said.<\/p>\n

White said that ice volcanoes \u201cwould be one of the most phenomenal discoveries of New Horizons, and would make Pluto an even more fascinating and unique place than it\u2019s already proven itself to be.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter all, nothing like this has been seen in the deep outer solar system,\u201d said Jeff Moore, leader of New Horizons\u2019 geology, geophysics and imaging team from NASA Ames.<\/p>\n

\"This
This high-resolution image captured by NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft shows Pluto in exaggerated color to better identify different geologic regions. The bright expanse is the western lobe of the \u201cheart,\u201d informally called Sputnik Planum, which has been found to be rich in nitrogen, carbon monoxide and methane ices. Credit: NASA\/JHUAPL\/SWRI<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Scientists shared their latest interpretations of Pluto at the 47th annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society\u2019s Division for Planetary Sciences near Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n

The suspected volcanoes Wright Mons and Piccard Mons sit to the south of Sputnik Planum, the nickname for an expansive frozen plain composed of current-like flow features and shaped ice blocks stretching across a swath of Pluto the size of Texas.<\/p>\n

The ice field makes up the western half of a bright heart-shaped feature spotted as New Horizons approached Pluto in July, and it lies next a dark belt pelted with craters believed to be billions of years old.<\/p>\n

But the lack of impacts in Sputnik Planum tells geologists the region is relatively young, perhaps forming within the last 10 million years, scientists said Monday.<\/p>\n

Tectonics, resurfacing and slow glacial movement can erase the record of craters seen elsewhere on Pluto, according to Kelsi Singer, a scientist based at the Southwest Research Institute.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve mapped more than a thousand craters, which vary greatly in size and appearance,\u201d Singer said in a statement. \u201cAmong other things, I expect cratering studies like these to give us important new insights into how this part of the solar system formed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alex Parker, a planetary astronomer at SWRI, studied the crater record on Pluto and Charon to glean insights into the the wider population in the Kuiper Belt, a ring of icy bodies outside the orbit of Neptune, of which Pluto is the largest.<\/p>\n

Nearly all of the craters on Pluto and Charon came from impacts with Kuiper Belt Objects, Parker said, but there are surprisingly few small impact markings. The finding could mean many such worlds in the Kuiper Belt may have formed not as an accumulation of many smaller bodies, but in one piece, challenging a longstanding model on the history of outer frontier of the solar system.<\/p>\n

If true, the theory means medium-sized residents of the Kuiper Belt, such as the next target of the New Horizons mission, are likely primordial relics left over from the beginning of the solar system, the very building blocks that came together to form larger worlds.<\/p>\n

A sequence of rocket firings in the last three weeks nudged the New Horizons spacecraft on course toward a Kuiper Belt Object the size of Rhode Island named 2014 MU69. NASA still must grant final approval for the mission to proceed toward the next flyby target, which New Horizons will reach on New Year\u2019s Day 2019, after weighing its costs and benefits.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf an extended mission is approved, and we can actually fly to this object and explore it, it will be the first of this class of objects we\u2019ve ever seen,\u201d Parker said.<\/p>\n

Data crunching has also revealed Pluto\u2019s rarefied nitrogen atmosphere hangs closer to the surface than expected.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe thought the exobase \u2014 the top of the atmosphere \u2014 was seven to eight times larger than Pluto,\u201d said Leslie Young, deputy project scientist on the New Horizons mission at SWRI. \u201cNow we know it\u2019s only about two-and-a-half times larger than Pluto. It\u2019s still an extended atmosphere, but much more compact.\u201d<\/p>\n

Molecules are escaping from Pluto\u2019s atmosphere at a much lower rate than previously thought, scientists said, and the atmosphere is being stripped by the same mechanism that blasts gases away from Earth and Mars.<\/p>\n

New Horizons also glimpsed Pluto\u2019s four tiniest moons during its brief flyby, turning the dim points of light only discovered within the last decade into worlds worthy of study.<\/p>\n

\"A
A family portrait of Pluto\u2019s four smallest moons, showing the multi-lobe appearance of Kerberos and Hydra, indicating they could have formed from the merger of two smaller moons. Credit: NASA\/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory\/Southwest Research Institute<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Images show two of the satellites, Kerberos and Hydra, likely coalesced when two smaller objects merged some time long ago. Pluto\u2019s other two small moons, Styx and Nix, may have formed the same way, according to Mark Showalter, a New Horizons co-investigator from the SETI Institute.<\/p>\n

The formation theory suggests Pluto once had more moons in the wake of an ancient cataclysmic collision that siphoned off part of Pluto to form Charon, Showalter said.<\/p>\n

The quartet of diminutive moons also behave chaotically, with wildly rotating motions that might be influenced by the pull of Charon, which could keep the satellites from \u201cde-spinning\u201d into slower rotation rates, as scientists predicted.<\/p>\n

Hydra, the outermost of Pluto\u2019s moons, spins around 89 times in a single orbit.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe way I would describe this system is not just chaos but pandemonium,\u201d Showalter said.<\/p>\n

The data pipeline streaming down from New Horizons will continue through 2016, with the communications rate limited by the specifications of the probe\u2019s antenna and its vast distance from Earth.<\/p>\n

About 20 percent of the Pluto flyby data has reached the ground so far, Stern said Monday.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to try to frame this by talking about grades,\u201d Stern said. \u201cWe\u2019re four months past the flyby. I think it\u2019s fair to say that we can tell New Horizons gets an \u2018A\u2019 for exploration. All our flyby plans seem to have succeeded.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pluto had surprises, and Stern expects scientists to wrestle with the onslaught of data for years.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut I also think we get a couple of \u2018Fs\u2019. One \u2018F\u2019 is we get an \u2018F\u2019 for predictive ability,\u201d Stern said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is when the debates begin,\u201d said Curt Niebur, New Horizons program scientist at NASA Headquarters. \u201cThis is when the heated discussions begin. This is when the entire science community starts staying up throughout the night.\u201d<\/p>\n

Regarding the self-assigned \u201cF\u201d grade, Stern said: \u201cPluto and its system of satellites have really outsmarted us. It\u2019s the best bad grade I\u2019ve ever taken credit for in my life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Email the author.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The informally named feature Wright Mons, located south of Sputnik Planum on Pluto, is an unusual feature that\u2019s about 100 miles (160 kilometers) wide and 13,000 feet (4 kilometers) high. It displays a summit depression (visible in the center of the image) that\u2019s approximately 35 miles (56 kilometers) across, with a distinctive hummocky texture on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2172,3893,3894,3895,2173,2174,3896,2848],"class_list":["post-15937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-charon","tag-dps-2015","tag-hydra","tag-kerberos","tag-kuiper-belt","tag-new-horizons","tag-nix","tag-pluto"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15937"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15937"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15937\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}