{"id":19592,"date":"2015-10-08T23:55:52","date_gmt":"2015-10-08T15:55:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/new-horizons-pluto-pictures-reveal-a-weird-blue-glow-and-water-ice\/"},"modified":"2015-10-08T23:55:52","modified_gmt":"2015-10-08T15:55:52","slug":"new-horizons-pluto-pictures-reveal-a-weird-blue-glow-and-water-ice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/new-horizons-pluto-pictures-reveal-a-weird-blue-glow-and-water-ice\/","title":{"rendered":"New Horizons\u2019 Pluto pictures reveal a weird blue glow \u2013 and water ice!"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Blue
A picture from NASA\u2019s New Horizons probe reveals the blue color of Pluto\u2019s atmospheric haze, as seen in a backlit view. Credit: NASA \/ JHUAPL \/ SwRI<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The latest pictures from NASA\u2019s New Horizons mission to Pluto reveal for the first time that the backlit dwarf planet is surrounded by a beautiful blue glow \u2013 and also pinpoint the location of water ice deposits exposed on the surface.<\/p>\n

Thursday\u2019s images were released after a hubbub that suggested an \u201camazing\u201d discovery would be revealed this week. Although the hype got a bit out of control, the revelations really do raise intriguing questions about Pluto\u2019s weather and geology.<\/p>\n

First, about that blue sky: New Horizons captured pictures of the sunlight scattered by Pluto\u2019s thin atmospheric haze shortly after its July 14 flyby \u2013 but the color view from the Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera, part of the spacecraft\u2019s Ralph instrument suite, came down only recently.<\/p>\n

\"pluto\"
\nScience journalist Alan Boyle<\/strong> is the author of “The Case for Pluto: How a Little Planet Made A Big Difference.”<\/p>\n

\u201cWho would have expected a blue sky in the Kuiper Belt? It\u2019s gorgeous,\u201d mission principal investigator Alan Stern said in Thursday\u2019s news release. (The Kuiper Belt is the broad ring of icy objects that lie beyond the orbit of Neptune.)<\/p>\n

Stern and his colleagues suspect that the particles creating the blue glow are actually reddish bits of soot-like compounds known as tholins. Such particles would be created when the sun\u2019s ultraviolet radiation sparks reactions between nitrogen and methane in the atmosphere.<\/p>\n

So how can reddish material create a blue glow? It all has to do with what happens to light rays as they zip through the edge of the atmosphere. Red light is scattered away by the fine particles, while blue light continues its path to the observer. A similar phenomenon explains why Titan\u2019s orange atmosphere looks blue at the edge, and why sunsets are blue on red Mars.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the evidence for water on Pluto: For weeks, New Horizons\u2019 scientists have suspected that the dwarf planet\u2019s towering mountains were built from deposits of frozen H2O, but the latest view gets into the details. Ralph\u2019s spectral composition mapper reveals the areas where water ice is exposed \u2013 and where it isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

\"Water
Regions with exposed water ice are highlighted in blue in this composite image from New Horizons\u2019 Ralph instrument, combining visible imagery from the Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera with infrared spectroscopy from the Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array. The scene is approximately 280 miles (450 kilometers) across. Credit: NASA \/ JHUAPL \/ SwRI<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cLarge expanses of Pluto don\u2019t show exposed water ice, because it\u2019s apparently masked by other, more volatile ices across most of the planet,\u201d science team member Jason Cook of the Southwest Research Institute is quoted as saying. \u201cUnderstanding why water appears exactly where it does, and not in other places, is a challenge that we are digging into.\u201d<\/p>\n

One curious clue: The places where water ice is exposed seem to correspond with the places where those reddish tholins are concentrated on the surface.<\/p>\n

New Horizons will be sending back data from its flyby for at least the next year, so stay tuned for still more amazing discoveries from Pluto \u2013 and more amazing mysteries as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A picture from NASA\u2019s New Horizons probe reveals the blue color of Pluto\u2019s atmospheric haze, as seen in a backlit view. Credit: NASA \/ JHUAPL \/ SwRI The latest pictures from NASA\u2019s New Horizons mission to Pluto reveal for the first time that the backlit dwarf planet is surrounded by a beautiful blue glow \u2013 […]<\/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":[190,2174,2848],"class_list":["post-19592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-nasa","tag-new-horizons","tag-pluto"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19592"}],"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=19592"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19592\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}