Mere days ago, we were graced with a real life image of Charon as it was taken last summer from the edges of the solar system and now we have even more astonishing news form New Horizons spacecraft. This time it’s about Pluto itself, and the amazing images that were rendered by NASA after the space probe that was launched back in 2006 did a fly by the dwarf planet last year during the summer.
The data that the probe has been feeding and beaming back to Earth along its 10-year trip has provided an immense amount of insight about the workings of our own solar system and truly went where nobody had been before. The newest news feeds from NASA display even more information that New Horizons has gathered from the farthest edges of our solar system; and more explicitly images and recordings of the dwarf planet Pluto.
Scientists have been studying all of the data gathered from Pluto ever since it first started getting fed to them back on Earth. A new analysis suggests that Pluto’s glaciers and made of water ice and that they float similarly to how icebergs do on the surface of the earth.
The reason this is possible is because of a difference in density. Because the water ice that the glaciers are made of has a lower density of the frozen nitrogen that the surface below them has (also common to objects in the Kuiper belt), they tend to ‘float’ or travel slowly. Although the glaciers there remain hard and frozen solid due to the -380 degrees Fahrenheit temperature on Pluto, they seem to break apart and move in a series.
These were conclusions drawn after closely studying the images depicting one particular zone of the planet Pluto – namely the Sputnik Planum. It was detected that the glaciers would slowly move across the flat plane, sometimes as much as 12 miles across it. In earth terms, this would translate in gigantic icebergs that move across the frozen oceans. Except in Pluto’s case, it’s a gigantic frozen surface of nitrogen.
A particular portion of the Sputnik Planum, namely the Challenger Colles, appears to be a large accumulation of these glaciers. Scientists speculate that this is a place where the nitrogen ice below is shallower than in other parts, making the water ice glaciers ‘station’ and gather here. The Challenger Colles zone is 37 by 22 miles, while the entire Sputnik Planum zone is believed to span for about 300 by 210 miles.
The image taken by New Horizons was captured about 12 minutes before the probe’s closest approach to Pluto, from a range of approximately 9,950 miles from the surface on July 14th, 2015.
Image Source: 1
Michael Turner
