Pluto is Much Colder Than Expected

IZ Reloaded writes "Any would be travellers to Pluto should bring extra winter gear. The new temperature on Pluto according to scientists is 43 degrees Kelvin. That's 10 degrees Kelvin colder than expected. From CNN: "Astronomers think Pluto's colder than expected temperature reading involves interactions between nitrogen ice on the planet's surface and the nitrogen gas that makes up its atmosphere...Pluto is a dynamic example of what we might call an anti-greenhouse effect...""

Comments

Explanation for the difference

[winkydink]

First time they used an oral thermometer, the second time a rectal one.

Not that cold...

[_PimpDaddy7_]

The new temperature on Pluto according to scientists is 43 degrees Kelvin.

That's nothing, my ex girlfriend easily was the coldest object in our solar system. She had to be way colder than that.

Re:Not that cold...

[quokkapox]

Yes, and you appear to be the ultimate ladies' man yourself, Mr. PimpDaddy7.

Not degrees

[whmac33]

Could I be the first to point out that it's just 10 Kelvin? no degrees here

For the lazy

[krunoce]

43 kelvin

= -382.27 degrees Fahrenheit
= -230.15 degrees Celsius

= really fucking cold outside.

In other words

[hyc]

it's just the sort of place you'd need to run a few Pentium Extreme Edition systems.

But seriously, while researchers try to find exotic materials that exhibit room-temperature superconductivity, you could take more common materials and run them at insanely fast speeds out there. Of course, it would take a while to upload your code and data and download any processing results.......

Maybe the dark side of Mercury would be more feasible.

Re:In other words

[techno-vampire]

Maybe the dark side of Mercury would be more feasible.

What "dark side of Mercury?" It's been known for over twenty years that Mercury rotates in 2/3 of the time it takes to orbit the sun rather than having its day equal to its year. It's just that the best times to observe the planet by telescope come about 2/3 or 4/3 of an orbit apart. (Not sure which one, but in either case, the same side was always lit when we could observe it. It took doppler radar to find out what was really going on.)

weird science

[loserhead]

so it says that Charon, Pluto's moon, is warmer than the planet. Since Charon is almost as big as Pluto, I am sure this new tidbit will add more to the deabte concerning what relation the two celestial bodies have with each other and how they came to be paired.

Sensational + by someone without a science degree

[Dzimas]

The correct use is "43 kelvins." Unlike degrees Celsius or degrees Fahrenheit (both adjectives), it is a noun, and the correct pluralization is kelvins.

I'm sure some newspaper will soon start running headlines about how Pluto is "23% colder than anticipated." In the real world, 10 K isn't that much, although it would be nice to know why our estimates are off. For reference, water freezes at 273.15 K, and the deepest darkest nook of outer space registers about 2.7 K, thanks to some background microwave radiation.

BAH!

[dteichman2]

My P4 would fix that in about 10 mins.

Re:hmm

[Vellmont]

I don't understand why it would require so much more insulation. Isn't heat transfer proportional to the difference in temperature of each side? So if you wanted to maintain your equipment at 0c, that's 273K-43K = 230 vs 273K-53K= 220. The heat transfer of the material is a constant, so 230/220 = 1.045, so about 4.5% thicker insulation.

But it's not so much . . .

[Dausha]

It's not so much the cold as it is the humidity.

Re:About this anti-greenhouse effect...

[craXORjack]

No. Pluto only has an atmosphere during its summer which it is currently in. (It is closer to the sun at 30AU than it will be again for a very long time) During the winter the atmosphere will give up it's heat and fall to the surface as solid nitrogen snow where it will sit for a couple hundred years until the sun once again turns it from solid to gas. But the surface will always stay at the same temperature. This is the same effect seen when you measure the temperature of water with ice cubes in it. The water will stay at 32 degrees until all the ice is gone even if you put a flame underneath. The added heat would merely make the ice melt faster rather than raise the water temperature.

In other news...

[Somatic]

> it's just the sort of place you'd need to run a few Pentium Extreme Edition systems.

Microsoft has already launched a probe to harness the power of Pluto to cool the Xbox 360.

The White House, misreading the term "global warming", immediately denied that Pluto exists. After reading the article they retracted the statement and issued another, stating that they will investigate Pluto's "anti-warmification properties".

An investigation has been opened into just who Kelvin is, and why he's allowed to practice science without a degree.

Off topic Kelvin joke

[Flying pig]

Lord Kelvin has a son who inherits the title. He goes to Cambridge and takes his first degree in Natural Sciences and gets a First, while still managing to play Rugby. Then he goes to Oxford to do his BSc, and then goes back to Cambridge where he does a brilliant PhD while turning out part time for the England cricket team. At which point he has a nervous breakdown from all the work. As part of his recovery program he is found a nice quiet job working as a bus conductor (NB only older UK residents will understand this.)
One day two Girton girls are on his bus and one remarks his age and physique, turns to the other and murmurs "Super conductor". To which the other replies "Three degrees Kelvin."

As a result of the parent post, this joke is now officially demolished.

Re:hmm

[gauge boson]

Actually, the electronics needs to work also during the trip, where the temperature is about 2.7 K.

Not really. The temperature of the heliosphere is actually rather high -- don't remember exactly offhand, but it's higher than the interstellar medium, which is somewhere around 7000K (give or take a couple thousand Kelvins). It's just that it stores almost no heat, since there's so little matter. (This is slightly sloppy wording, but close enough.) The upshot is that there is almost no heat conduction in either direction and almost all heat transfer occurs by blackbody radiation, which is amazingly inefficient. Even though Pluto doesn't have an atmosphere, touching the surface changes this entirely by providing a material to transfer heat to -- that's why a probe landing on Pluto would need a lot of insulation that a non-landing probe (e.g., V'ger) wouldn't.

Re:hmm

[gauge boson]

That's not the temperature of the interstellar medium, it's the temperature of the cosmic background radiation -- they are completely different. I can see where the confusion could come from, though. Short version:

• Cosmic Microwave Background: The residual heat of the big bang, redshifted (cooled) by ~13 billion years of expansion. This temperature is given in terms of the Stefan-Boltzmann relation (blackbody temperature), and basically represents the average temperature of the whole universe, including the vast, cold, empty intergalactic regions.
• Interstellar Medium: A very diffuse (though still dense compared to the intergalactic regions) cloud of ionized gas filling the whole galaxy. These ionized particles move around very quickly, i.e., they're very hot (Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution). 7000K +/- 2000K according to this synopsis, at least for regions near the heliosphere.
• Heliosphere: The gaseous bubble surrounding the sun out to about 100AU (Voyager 1 hit the termination shock where it meets the ISM at 94AU). It's hotter and denser than the interstellar medium, and it's where any space probe we launch would be travelling. Of course, since there is so little gas in even the heliosphere (its pressure would be considered a hard vacuum on Earth), these temperatures have very little effect on any spacecraft.