Dwarf Planet Pluto Hiding Water Suggests More Oceans In Space
When new images of Pluto came in last year, the Inquisitr reported on the exciting news and provided some of those images that gave people a closer look at an alien planet we’ve only known about but never actually saw.
Noah Hammond, who is the lead author of the paper “Recent Tectonic Activity on Pluto Driven by Phase Changes in the Ice Shell,” feels that there’s a chance there’s at least another ocean on the dwarf planet.
That’s right, dwarf planet.
“Our model shows that recent geological activity on Pluto can be driven just from phase changes in the ice — no tides or exotic materials or unusual processes are required. If Pluto’s most recent tectonic episode is extensional, that means that Pluto may have an ocean at present.”
But there is also reason to believe that this could go beyond Pluto, as they explain further.
“This lends support to the idea that oceans may be common among large Kuiper Belt objects, just as they are common among the satellites of the outer planets.”
The New Horizons spacecraft was designed to specifically target the Pluto system which includes the study of one or more Kuiper belt objects (KBO) and was launched in January 2006, and only recently entered the system in July of 2015 when it began its exploration.
From their analysis, it would appear that Pluto has an ocean that is active, only partially frozen.
On July 4, the NASA spacecraft Juno is scheduled to encounter Jupiter where scientists will be able to get a closer look at Europa, one of the planet’s moons, which many have long believed to also have a subsurface ocean.
TimeMagazine recently covered the importance of this mission and many others to come, specifically for that area which is far closer to the Sun than Pluto is.
Europa's ocean has the right chemistry for life: https://t.co/ZmIOdBtBg5 pic.twitter.com/u1sFtL6zHb
— Forbes Science (@ForbesScience) May 29, 2016
Images of one of the Jupiter’s moons have shown dark grooves on the surface which appear to change shape over time, causing scientists to believe this is proof of that possibility. Many NASA engineers have been offering pitches for probe designs which might be able to travel through the water and send back images.
Even drill designs have been thrown about for potential future missions, which could begin as early as 2022.
The differences between Europa’s ocean and Pluto’s are the temperatures and how a subsurface ocean is formed in a colder climate.
What scientists have determined is that there is a decay of radioactive elements within the dwarf planet’s core which heats up the ice enough to separate it from the rock, creating the potential water ice.
The paper suggests it has to be water in order to result in the pattern seen on the surface.
There have been other oceans considered on various moons and planets, not necessarily made of water as the one suspected on Pluto.
In many cases, there are also oceans of magma on other planets or moons, and it’s even theorized that there could be an ocean of diamonds on Uranus.
Much of the information provided in the video is only in theory, until there is a thorough expedition of robots or people – if possible – to verify and confirm those theories are true and that is far too long into the future, and there is too small of a shoestring budget for NASA to conduct anytime soon.
While there might be something in the works to send another spaceship to the Pluto system, nothing has been reported as of yet that a new project is at all in-the-works.
[Image by NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/Public Domain 1.0]
