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NASA's New Horizons Shows Methane Ice-Capped Mountains On Pluto (nasa.gov)
Last week, it was ice canyons; now, as an anonymous reader writes: The latest images to come from NASA's New Horizons space probe's encounter with Pluto last July 2015 is of a methane snow-capped mountain range around that dwarf planet's equator located in the region known to scientists as Cthulhu. Cthulhu starts from the west of Sputnik Planum, a great nitrogen ice plain, and stretches 1,850 miles long and 450 miles wide, half way around Pluto's equator, making it slightly larger than the state of Alaska. Cthulhu appears to be a dark surface on all of the images returned by New Horizons. Scientists theorize that the darkness is caused by thorins, molecules that result when methane is exposed to sunlight. Cthulhu is a complex region, containing both smooth and heavily cratered plains and the mountain range already mentioned.
... above the frozen plain!
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I've heard stuff like this since I was in elementary school. We found nitrogen, ice, rock, and lots of other boring stuff. Let's look for stuff that's truly interesting and terrifying, like a giant space traveling wad of chewing gum the size of Nebraska.
Clearly these are the Mountains of Madness. The darkness there is caused by teaming masses of Shoggoths.
I went off to Google looking for these "thorins", but had little luck beyond this very press release. It turns out that the term is actually tholin , originally attributed to our old friend Carl Sagan.
It's almost as though there were a Mandarin speaker somewhere in the publicity chain...
Wot? No jokes about ancient gods?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Just because we can't pronounce it, doesn't mean we can't laugh about it!
all the features of the planet with none of the status and recognition.