Faces of Pluto: Interesting Surprises Await!
Pluto, the planet with obvious separation anxiety, has decided to send us a sign. It’s changing colors and lightening up in places, and no one knows why. Molasses-colored splotches are appearing on Pluto’s surface. Planet Watchers have their suspicions, suspicions in this case being very intriguing reasons. Could this be the beginning of primordial life in the farthest reaches of our solar system?
The reason no one really knows is because this lonely dwarf planet resides so far away from us that even the Hubble Space Telescope has trouble making out what’s going on.
A team of researchers led by Marc Buie of the Southwest Research Institute recently released the best Hubble images to date (see above). Even the fuzziness has revealed a surprising amount of never-before-seen activity.
When Hubble images of Pluto from 1994 were compared to images of 2003, it was discovered that Pluto’s northern hemisphere had brightened while the southern hemisphere had dimmed. Observations from planet Earth suggest that Pluto’s atmosphere doubled in mass during approximately the same time period.
So, what in the world is happening to Pluto’s atmosphere? “Pluto, right now, has the best atmosphere it’s had in our lifetime,” say the experts.
There are at least two compelling things about Pluto that might make it’s fine atmosphere go through periodic changes.
Compelling thing #1. Until the mid-1980s, Pluto’s northern hemisphere was tilted away from the sun for over 100 years, causing a substantial amount of frost to accumulate on the surface. Because the tilt of the planet has changed, the northern hemisphere is coming into sunlight.
Compelling thing # 2. The atmosphere might also be responding to Pluto’s highly eccentric orbit. During the late 1980s, Pluto approached as close to the sun as it ever gets (about 2 1/2 billion miles) and gradually started warming, bringing the temperature on Pluto up to a balmy -385 degrees Fahrenheit! Surface frosts exposed to such “warmth” may be subliming—that is, changing back into a gas.
And about that molasses…drum roll…….Researchers think these dark areas might be primordial organic matter.
Don’t ask me how, but the experts know there’s methane on Pluto. They think Sunlight hitting the methane breaks it apart into its chemical components — hydrocarbons. Over time (millions of years) this process might make a dark reddish-brown oil or tar like substance that sticks to the ground of Pluto. These darker areas spread larger as they absorb more sunlight and cause additional frost to change to gas.
Uh oh, hold on a minute, folks. Something is happening that totally debunks all the theories about Pluto’s atmosphere: Pluto is headed away from the sun. It’s atmosphere should be refreezing and becoming part of its surface, but it’s not……
NASA’s New Horizons probe is en route to investigate. The spacecraft left Earth in January 2006 and has been racing towards Pluto for an encounter in July 2015, hopefully before the atmosphere refreezes.
The plan is for New Horizons to map the entire sunlit portion of Pluto. And as it swings closer, it will get very detailed images, maybe as good as 50-100 meter resolution.
We might even finally see what’s causing those hydrocarbons.