Newly discovered dunes on Pluto are made of fine grains of frozen methane


READ MORE

Scientists have detected another exotic feature on one of the solar system’s most wondrous worlds: a large field of dunes on the surface of the distant, frigid dwarf planet Pluto apparently composed of wind-swept, sand-sized grains of frozen methane.


The dunes, spotted on images taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft during its 2015 flyby, sit at the boundary between a heart-shaped nitrogen glacier about the size of France called Sputnik Planitia and the Al Idrisi Montes mountain range made of frozen water, scientists said on Thursday.


“Pluto, even though it’s so far away from Earth and so very cold, has a riot of processes we never expected to see. It is far more interesting than any of us dreamed, and tells us that these very distant bodies are well worth visiting,” Brigham Young University planetary scientist Jani Radebaugh said.


NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto in 2015, revealing a far more geologically diverse world than astronomers once thought. (NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI)


The dunes cover about 2,000 square kilometres, roughly the size of Tokyo. Their existence came as a surprise. There was some doubt about whether Pluto’s extremely thin atmosphere, mainly nitrogen with minor amounts of methane and carbon monoxide, could muster the wind needed to form such features.


Pluto, smaller than Earth’s moon with a diameter of about 2,380 kilometres, orbits roughly 5.8 billion kilometres away from the sun, almost 40 times farther than Earth’s orbit, with a surface marked by plains, mountains, craters and valleys.


Dunes do have a habit of cropping up in a lot of surprising places.– Matt Telfer, University of Plymouth


Methane, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and nitrogen, all gaseous on Earth, are rendered solid with Pluto’s temperatures near absolute zero. Pluto’s dunes were shaped by moderate winds reaching around 35 km/h apparently blowing fine-grained frozen methane bits from mountaintops.


Pluto’s dunes resemble some on Earth like those in California’s Death Valley and China’s Taklamakan desert, though their composition differs, Radebaugh said.


Dunes have been detected elsewhere in the solar system, including planets Mars and Venus, Saturn’s moon Titan and Neptune’s moon Triton, University of Cologne physicist and geoscientist Eric Parteli said. Pluto’s dunes probably formed within the past 500,000 years, and potentially more recently, Parteli added.


“Given we have dunes on the scorching surface of Venus under a dense atmosphere, and out in the distant reaches of the solar system at -230 C under a thin atmosphere, yes, dunes do have a habit of cropping up in a lot of surprising places,” University of Plymouth planetary scientist Matt Telfer said.



Article source: https://www.thelocal.fr/20170921/yes-you-can-live-in-paris-without-speaking-french


Best Wordpress Plugin development company in India     Best Web development company in India

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Canadian expected to be aboard Russia's 1st manned space mission since rocket failure

READ MORE The first manned mission to the International Space Station since a Russian rocket failed to launch successfully earlier this month may take off on Dec. 3, space agency Roscosmos said on Wednesday. And the crew is expected to include Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques, Agence France-Press reported. A Russian cosmonaut and U.S. astronaut were forced to abort their mission on Oct. 11 and perform an emergency landing after a launch accident that Roscomos said was caused by a faulty sensor. The accident was the first serious launch problem experienced by a manned Soyuz space mission since 1983, when a crew narrowly escaped before a launch pad explosion. Sergei Krikalyov, a senior Roscosmos official, was quoted by state news agency Tass as saying the next manned launch had been planned for mid-December, but that Russia was trying to bring the date forward so that the ISS is not briefly left without a crew. “The industry is making significant efforts to move the launch t...
Read more

Getting the dope on pot stocks is becoming easier as media groups invest in content: Don Pittis

Image
READ MORE “What’s the buzz? Tell me what’s happening,” goes the ’70s rock anthem. Part of the catchiness of the lyric — from the rock musical Jesus Christ Superstar  — was that in that era the term “buzz” had developed a second spicy meaning. It described the high that people got from smoking cannabis. In the 1970s, the magazine High Times was a brand new title keeping an eye on the illegal but growing business of marijuana pricing and sales. It ran centrefolds of glistening pot plants and of an apartment filled to the windows with what the magazine insisted was an entire ton of cannabis. Now some of Canada’s most staid media voices are looking for ways to go toe to toe with High Times and its U.S. competitors, hoping to profit from Canada’s global head start in legal recreational cannabis. But when it comes to making a killing from spreading the buzz on the cannabis biz, to q...
Read more

Toronto man denies conspiring with Marvel CEO in alleged hate mail scheme

Image
READ MORE A Toronto man accused of conspiring with the head of Marvel Entertainment in a bizarre hate mail campaign against his wealthy former employer has denied any role in the alleged scheme. David Smith, along with Marvel CEO Isaac (Ike) Perlmutter, is the target of a slander lawsuit launched earlier this year by Canadian businessman Harold Peerenboom. Now Smith — a former employee of Peerenboom’s Toronto-based executive search firm, Mandrake Management — has filed a motion to dismiss the U.S. civil suit. It’s the latest development in the years-long legal battle between Peerenboom and Perlmutter, a notoriously reclusive American billionaire and personal friend of U.S. President Donald Trump. The hate mail campaign, which ran   between 2012 to 2015, saw anonymous letters falsely accusing Peerenboom of being a child molester, murderer and anti-Semite...
Read more