NASA's New Horizons Shows Methane Ice-Capped Mountains On Pluto (nasa.gov)

Posted by timothy on Saturday March 5, 2016 @04:59AM from the wonder-what-homes-cost-on-cthulhu-regio dept.

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.

1 of 14 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

THOLIN, not "thorin", apparently... by jeffb+(2.718) · 2016-03-05 07:40 · Score: 4, Informative

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...