These mountains accumulate ice in the opposite way anywhere in the solar system.
NASA’s new Horizon probe flew by Pluto in 2015, providing the closest and most detailed view of our dwarf planet ever. The investigation revealed features that are similar to those spectacular snow-capped mountain chains on Earth.
New Horizons is another discovery made using data that changes the way scientists understand Pluto.
The dwarf planet exists in a space called the Kuiper Belt on the edge of our solar system, where icy, old remnants of the solar system orbit the sun at such a distance that they remain like fixed-time capsules.
Pluto is 6.6 billion miles from the Sun – about 0 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun – and takes 888 Earth years in a single year. This makes Pluto a cold place covered with ice, and its surface is between negative 378 and negative 396 degrees Fahrenheit.
Its thin atmosphere contains nitrogen, methane, and carbon dioxide, and although the sky over Pluto is blue, the ice is red due to its chemical composition.
But in Pluto’s equatorial region, also called the Cthulhu region, bright white snow accumulates surprisingly on top of the red.
“Pluto is covered with exotic-structural parts and its landscape looks like polar caps on Earth (Greenland and Antarctica),” said Tangui Bertrand, lead study author and post-doctoral researcher at NASA Ames Research Center in California. CNN
“The New Horizons also discovered spectacular mountains on Pluto that were covered by glowing deposits, resembling mountain chains covered with ice seen on Earth.” “This type of landscape has not been seen anywhere else in the Solar System. Can Pluto’s atmosphere behave like the Earth? We have discovered that a new and unique atmospheric process (in the Solar System) creates these icy mountains on Pluto.”
Pluto is covered with methane deposits, but the ones seen in the Cthulhu area look a lot like crater rims, walls and snow accumulating on top of a mountain. But scientists weren’t sure about the composition of these deposits – either methane-rich or a combination of methane and nitrogen – as well as how they formed.
Data collected during the New Horizons mission allowed Bertrand and his colleagues to create simulations of high-resolution environments to better understand the dwarf planet’s methane cycle. They found that ice deposits are rich in methane. But they don’t form like snow or snowpacks on Earth.
On Earth, atmospheric temperature decreases with atmospheric altitude. The same thing happens with surface temperatures because the altitude increases as the colder, colder atmosphere cools the surface, Bertrand said. So when a moist wind comes close to a mountain, it rises above the slope, cools it, and solidifies the water to form snow-capped peaks, he said.
On Pluto, it is the opposite.
When Pluto’s surface temperature is extremely cold, its atmosphere is actually warmed by the sun. As the temperature rises, so does the temperature.
“At its contact the air cools and flows down the slope,” Bertrand explained. “Pluto’s atmosphere contains more aerated methane at its warmer, higher altitudes, allowing it to satisfy the gas and freeze directly on mountain tops, reaching richer areas. At lower altitudes, aerated methane is less, and it can Not solid. “
Researchers believe that this same process may be responsible for other methane-rich deposits in Pluto.
It helps to explain the presence of blade terrain or ste bho, narrow stripes, such as the Tararus Dorsa region on Pluto, where methane deposits are paramount.
These surface features have some reach on Pluto, also forming large amounts of methane and a small amount of water.
“This discovery teaches us that there are still a lot of physical and dynamic processes in space that we don’t know about, and that the climate can be very different than Earth’s (even though it created a similar landscape),” Bertrad said.
“It is important to study the study of Pluto and other planets because it is natural laboratories to find and investigate the diversity of possible atmospheres (and geology and other planetary sciences) that give us a better perspective on our own climate.”
Understanding Pluto also helps researchers understand what is common and specific to planetary climates, and helps keep Pluto’s atmosphere on a scale of other climates known in our solar system, he said.
.
