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The Frozen Plains of Pluto's 'Heart'

Posted by Soulskill on from the book-your-travel-plans-early dept.

New Horizons has sent back new images of Pluto, including a close-up view of the "Tombaugh Regio," which resembles a giant, pale heart stretching 1,600 km across the dwarf planet's surface. The new images show a broad plain free of any craters, broken into irregular segments by shallow troughs. Scientists don't know how they formed, but here are two leading theories: "The irregular shapes may be the result of the contraction of surface materials, similar to what happens when mud dries. Alternatively, they may be a product of convection, similar to wax rising in a lava lamp." This image comes alongside new data on Pluto's extended atmosphere.

NASA has released other new findings from the Pluto region, as well. Pluto is trailed by a region of cold, ionized gas ripped away from its atmosphere by the solar wind. We've also gotten a close look at Charon, Pluto's biggest moon. One unusual feature is a sizable mountain rising from an even larger depression in the moon's surface. On top of that, NASA has released the first look at Nix, a tiny satellite of Pluto roughly 40 km in diameter. The image is highly pixelated, but we should get a better image tomorrow, during New Horizon's Saturday downlink. The NY Times has a gallery of images, which also includes pictures of Hydra (another small moon) and a different shot of the Pluto's plains area.

42 comments

  1. Wow by amicusNYCL · · Score: 2, Funny

    Alternatively, they may be a product of convection, similar to wax rising in a lava lamp.

    Holy shit, that stuff inside a lava lamp is wax? I never knew that! Thanks, NASA!

    --
    "Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
    1. Re:Wow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Dunno why you got modded Flamebait. I didn't know that either. Thanks, NASA.

  2. Mountain in a crater by fustakrakich · · Score: 1

    You mean like this?

    --
    “He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
    1. Re:Mountain in a crater by amicusNYCL · · Score: 1

      Not really, more like this.

      --
      "Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
    2. Re:Mountain in a crater by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ah, so it's just a rock sinking into the soft ground. It's fake, I tell ya! There is no Pluto. There is no space! It is all lies!

    3. Re:Mountain in a crater by Rei · · Score: 1

      It's really weird. I've heard a lot of people speculate that it's just an asteroid that "landed gently" in Charon's low gravity or something by being on a really lucky trajectory. But it just doesn't work that way. Picture running the time axis in reverse. Does one think that there's a particular trajectory that they could pick the rock back up and throw it back into space without requiring a lot of energy? The fact is that even on a body like Charon, big chunks of rock can't just gently settle down.

      It's just a really weird thing to see.

      --
      "You see, Government is a system that is based on weapons." -- Timster
    4. Re:Mountain in a crater by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 1

      Nah, like this.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    5. Re:Mountain in a crater by amicusNYCL · · Score: 1

      Could it have been an initial impact in another part of the moon where the impactor fragmented and this piece "bounced" around before landing here? It does look strange, because anything that large which would land and make a depression that deep, it seems like there would be at least some ejecta rays or a crater rim or something. It looks like a big finger smushed the land down and then put a rock in it.

      Or maybe it's a mountain feature where for whatever reason the ground around the base has eroded away. Maybe the mountain was warmer and caused nitrogen snow or something to sublime away.

      I'd really like an explanation for it. The worst thing about missions like this is that we go zipping by taking awesome pictures of amazing things, and we can't easily go back and get better pictures of things we want to investigate.

      --
      "Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
    6. Re:Mountain in a crater by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "gently" is relative, and doesn't imply it just crawled to a stop before touching the surface. On the other hand, it if hit "gentle" enough to not significantly shatter the rock, but to shatter the surface material, a lot of energy could be dissipated into the surface. Trying to talk about time running in reverse will give the same problem of when looking at a tea cup smashed against the ground, except in this case it is the ground breaking and not the falling object.

    7. Re:Mountain in a crater by Rei · · Score: 1

      That's the point. The escape velocity on Charon is 580 meters per second. So even something with no momentum when it arrived at Charon would be falling at 580 m/s (1300 mph) when it hit the ground. Picture shooting Mount Everest into the ground at that velocity. Is this really what you'd expect to see as a result, it holding together and just sitting in a hole? Of course not, it'd shatter and explode massively, kick out a rim, fill in the transient crater with debris, etc - aka, a crater forming event. And that's the bare minimum impact velocity, realistic impacts would be far harder (dozens of kilometers per second) in the overwhelming majority of situations..

      --
      "You see, Government is a system that is based on weapons." -- Timster
    8. Re:Mountain in a crater by DamnOregonian · · Score: 2

      And that's the bare minimum impact velocity

      Bare minimum for an object with no momentum, yes.
      Bare minimum impact velocity? certainly not. Though it's hard to imagine the scenario where Charon gently overcomes and bumps something with similar orbital characteristics

    9. Re:Mountain in a crater by Rei · · Score: 1

      Picture reversing the time vector. Do you think you can gently throw an object to Charon escape just by choosing some clever trajectory? No? Then why do you think it will work that way and land with a gentle velocity with time flowing in the opposite direction?

      --
      "You see, Government is a system that is based on weapons." -- Timster
    10. Re:Mountain in a crater by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Charon doesn't exist by itself but in a two body system which allows a third body to exchange momentum with Pluto...

    11. Re:Mountain in a crater by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      As you say, it can't be a foreign object sitting on the surface causing it to bend down. What seems more likely is that it's an upwelling of material from the moon's interior, essentially a volcanic eruption. As it erupted, it deflated an underground magma chamber equivalent so the surrounding ground subsided as the center rose higher.

    12. Re:Mountain in a crater by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Actually, you can do a lot better than escape velocity with careful choice of trajectory, since taking Pluto into account, you only need less than 200 m/s to launch from Charon to the Pluto-Charon L1 point. Other interactions can gently push things in and out of the L1 point, not taking long as it isn't stable.

    13. Re:Mountain in a crater by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You could conceivably have much lower energy impacts than that, you just need another massive body involved. It's really not all that uncommon for objects to orbit each other in space, so why are we assuming that this object, if it was from a collision, didn't have a partner. There are a lot of ways that Charon and another passing object could have had a "tug of war" with another object, with Charon the winner, leaving the object to settle relatively gently on Charon.

  3. Probably... by garyisabusyguy · · Score: 3, Funny

    Fry trying to profess his love to Leela
    He has such a hard time with that

    --
    Wherever You Go, There You Are
    1. Re:Probably... by rmdingler · · Score: 1
      Plead the 5th.

      Element, of course.

      That's the way it goes; first your money, then your clothes.

      --
      Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

      Ernest Hemingway

  4. plutos x rated plains by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I see a ton of butts in G-strings and sexual imagery in those designs
    http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-new-horizons-discovers-frozen-plains-in-the-heart-of-pluto-s-heart

    1. Re:plutos x rated plains by Rockoon · · Score: 1

      I just see standard pattern number 7 in the Rorschach series that tests obsessive compulsiveness.

      --
      "His name was James Damore."
  5. Heart Oblique Impact? by RayHs · · Score: 1

    Isn't a heart shape one of the possible results of an oblique impact event? What if a piece flew off got caught in Charon's gravity and did a soft hit, wouldn't it look like a mountain in stuck in a small crater?

    1. Re:Heart Oblique Impact? by Rei · · Score: 5, Informative

      It seems more complicated than that (even ignoring that impacts don't generally make heart shapes). For example, have you seen the carbon monoxide data? It's all clustered in that area. Why would an asteroid make carbon monoxide cluster there?

      There's some really interesting things going on. Take a look at this picture and think of what it looks like to you:

      Link.

      Doesn't it look like... well... a shoreline?

      Now take a look at those fractures in Sputnik Planum - notice how they have a curious inner ridge:

      Link

      Where else have we seen that before? Oh right, Europa:

      Link

      It's the shape of a liquid welling up through a crack and freezing due to a drop in pressure.

      To me, this shows all the signs of a cryosea underneath an ice cap. Which leads to the question: can that occur on Pluto? And the answer is, "probably". With N2, CO, and CH4, you can get eutectics with triple points as low as 51K (a naive solar equilibrium-temperature calculation for pluto's surface, without any other sources of heat, reaches up to 55K). Add neon into the mix and it gets down to 24,6K. The key is, these liquids can't exist on the surface - they require pressure to exist. Which means that they can only exist as aquifers and subglacial lakes/seas. Pure nitrogen requires about 18 meters of pure nitrogen ice (more because it'd have pore space and be mixed with lower density ices). Pure neon would require about 3x as much.

      The flat areas in Tombaugh Regio have two radically different appearances. One is the aforementioned area that looks like sea ice with frozen cracks (Sputnik Planum). The other is what's being called a "pitted" terrain. The latter touches the "shore" of the regio, while the former is deep in the middle (at least, from the pictures revealed so far). If one wanted to step even further out onto the limb here, they could posit that the "pitted" terrain involves these ices sitting directly on "bedrock" (which in a pluto context here is water ice), while the terrain that looks like sea ice would have liquid dozens of meters or more down.

      But this is all just along one line of thinking. There's just so many possibilities right now. One notices, for example, similarities with various pluto features and frost-heaving earth features like pingos and ice wedges. But it could be something completely new entirely. This isn't water we're dealing with.

      A real crazy thing is to think about how there might be vertitable explosive processes on Pluto. Solid nitrogen that forms due to decompression undergoes an energetic glass to crystalline transition. And overall does really weird stuff when freezing (start about a minute in).

      Also note that there is nitrogen being lost from Pluto. Lots - 500 tonnes an hour. Over geological timeperiods, that's a massive, massive amount. Pluto loses its atmosphere 2 1/2 orders of magnitude faster than Mars. And yet it's still there. So where's it coming from? The team already pointed out that there doesn't seem to be a planetwide layer of deep nitrogen ice. To me that only seems to leave the possibility that it comes from deeper within the planet. But for it to move from deeper within to the top means a fluid (an aquifer), not an ice (either that or serious tectonics dragging up 500 tonnes an hour!). And given that Pluto's crust provides pre

      --
      "You see, Government is a system that is based on weapons." -- Timster
    2. Re:Heart Oblique Impact? by RayHs · · Score: 2

      That one picture does look a lot like the edge of a frost heave. Can't wait until the higher resolution images come out. It's looking like one could spend another 10 years looking at all the data that's coming. One thing I've noticed more from this mission's images than other ones is that there appears to be an excessive amount of enhancement done on the many of the images especially the ones from about a week ago, to the point where it's fooling the eye into seeing what appeared to be angular structures which disappeared when higher resolution images come out.

  6. That Flyby Image Of Charon... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Up to the North.
    http://graphics8.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2015/07/15/pluto-flyby-images/assets/150714-charon.jpg
    One does not simply walk into Mordor.

    1. Re:That Flyby Image Of Charon... by MrKaos · · Score: 1

      One does not simply walk into Mordor.

      In the darkest depths or Mordor, I met a girl so fair

      --
      My ism, it's full of beliefs.
    2. Re:That Flyby Image Of Charon... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Great bassline, and thoroughly incompetent lyrics.
      It turns out that there are no "Official" IAU naming conventions yet for the surface features of the Plutonian System. There is an informal ongoing poll.
      There are many features in the Middle Earth mythos that could be applied to Charon.
      Mount Gundabad, Mountains of Angmar, Withered Heath, Dol Guldur, Orodruin...

    3. Re:That Flyby Image Of Charon... by MrKaos · · Score: 1

      Perhaps the moated mountain could be called 'Golum's Keep'.

      --
      My ism, it's full of beliefs.
  7. Pluto identifies as a Planet by turkeydance · · Score: 0

    Astronomers are assholes.

  8. Internal heat of Pluto by mi · · Score: 2

    I read an explanation, that the reason for the observed absence of craters is that the (dwarf) planet remains active — like Earth and unlike Moon, for example.

    And that means, it may be possible to burrow deep enough into it and stay comfortably warm. Would not that be nice?

    --
    In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
    1. Re:Internal heat of Pluto by Tablizer · · Score: 1

      They don't know if the activity is ongoing, or from a recent one-time (or periodic) event. What we have is a mystery.

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
    2. Re:Internal heat of Pluto by mi · · Score: 1
      Well, if it were not recent, the surface would've been ridden with meteor craters — like Moon's.

      What we have is a mystery.

      Yeah...

      --
      In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
  9. Cold ionized gas... by sconeu · · Score: 1

    Pluto farts!!!!

    --
    General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
  10. Frozen plains? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You mean Disney got there too?! Goddamn it, I thought frozen had been done to death already!

  11. Man in the Boat by rmdingler · · Score: 2
    If the mountain in the moat formed due to the energetic effect of a heated inbound meteorite,

    that means ice was briefly liquid on friggin' Pluto.

    I don't even get people who aren't excited at this round's intelligent life form's shot of the first viewing of its region's most remote planet(ish), thus far.

    --
    Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

    Ernest Hemingway

    1. Re:Man in the Boat by Rei · · Score: 2

      I love how Alan Stern and the rest of the team go through lengths to call Pluto a planet. This time he even laid particular emphasis on calling Pluto-Charon a binary planet. :)

      Great team. Great project. Great results. Just amazing.
       

      --
      "You see, Government is a system that is based on weapons." -- Timster
    2. Re:Man in the Boat by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Except the mountain in the moat is on Charon, not Pluto.

    3. Re:Man in the Boat by rmdingler · · Score: 1
      As of the most recent interplanetary accords,

      the political appointees of social justice warriors had deemed that description as derogatory

      to binary planets.

      --
      Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

      Ernest Hemingway

    4. Re:Man in the Boat by sysrammer · · Score: 1

      Yes. Pluto is classified as a dwarf planet.

      --
      His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
  12. Looks like an electrical process by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This looks like a plating process. Material is removed by the solar wind which forms smooth surfaces and deposited to the peaks.

  13. Blockville by Tablizer · · Score: 1

    The artifacts of compression are quite visible in some of the photos. We'll have to wait several months before the non-lossy views come back, due to the distance.

    --
    Table-ized A.I.
  14. It NOT a heart! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Search for any real photo for a human heart. It does not look like that. It is God's butt print!