Behold: Pluto's huge ICE MOUNTAINS ... and signs of cryovolcanoes? NASA has revealed the first high-resolution photograph of Pluto's surface, and the first proper picture of its largest moon Charon – and they are frankly very strange indeed. The Pluto snap shows ice mountains 11,000ft tall, and on both pics there are perplexing signs of geological activity – perhaps even cryovolcanoes spewing …
"We've seen this activity in smaller bodies than Pluto, but only on moons orbiting gas giants. It had been thought that the immense gravitational pressures of these moons' host planets kneaded the interior with tidal forces that keep them geologically active."
Considering the inclination of the orbit and how elliptical it is (we haven't seen it complete a full orbit yet), the data would seem to indicate that it was recently (in a cosmological sense) a moon of one of one of the gas giants that has got kicked out somehow . How it picked up a bunch of moons by itself on the way is a little more confusing.
Apologies if I seem to be stating the obvious.
There was a comment that it is like the theory for the Earth's moon - a large impact knocked some of Pluto's material into orbit to coalesce as moons.
This theory had some general level of acceptance until New Horizons got closer and it turns out the albedo of Pluto and Charon are too different to comfortably accommodate this theory (Charon is quite a lot darker than Pluto). Now we see that both bodies are quite a lot less cratered than we might expect, which throws up further questions. This is all good, because it means there is still plenty of interesting science to do.
It would have had to have been kicked out extremely recently, or it would have picked up some obvious cratering. But it would then have had to settle into a stable orbit, with all other traces of the kicking also vanishing. Considering the time it needs to do even one orbit, I don't think it's anywhere near possible - the time to settle into the orbit is longer than the time to pick up obvious cratering.
What strikes me most about the various planets is quite how boring Uranus is in comparison to all the others. We now know that Pluto isn't just a dull sphere but an interesting, rock-like world with all kinds of activity and differences over its surface.
But Uranus? Go find a picture. It's never anything more than a blue orb.
I suppose, though, that one planet needs to be different, even if that means being different by being utterly boring. Uranus is the geek at the back of the class... :-)
From https://what-if.xkcd.com/30/
Uranus: Uranus is a strange, uniform bluish orb. There are high winds and it’s bitterly cold. It’s the friendliest of the gas giants to our Cessna, and you could probably fly for a little while. But given that it seems to be an almost completely featureless planet, why would you want to?
Of course, being science, this is probably wildly inaccurate. We just need someone in a Cessna to go and take some pictures for us.
The Voyager 2 pictures of Uranus were pretty much featureless, but that was at the summer solstice. Since its axis of rotation points almost at the sun, it doesn't have much diurnal variation in solar radiation to drive weather. It has a remarkably low internal heat. Pictures of Uranus from the HST taken closer to the time of the equinox show storms and bands: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2007/32/image/c/format/large_web/
We know so little about Uranus. Its atmosphere does not retain a geological record; how much could you say about the Earth by looking at its clouds? The rocky surfaces of Uranus's moons may hold clues as to its history.
Most of the solar systems planets, moons and the like have been passed by or landed on in my lifetime.
All bar one:
Craft - Venera 1 (Венера-1)
Target - Venus
Passed by - 19 May 1961
Contact with Venera 1 was lost 7 days after launch. It was the first spacecraft to fly by Venus, or indeed any planet.
[wikipedia]
Roj, I dare not type more than what was revealed in Sonnet X:
I knew those fires were brewing monstrous things,
And that those birds of space had been Outside —
I guessed to what dark planet’s crypts they plied,
And what they brought from Thog beneath their wings.
The others laughed — till struck too mute to speak
By what they glimpsed in one bird’s evil beak.
Except Pluto, god of the underworld has him in his clutches. Only Orpheus has returned from Hades. If you recall your Greek myths Charon is the ferryman over the Styx. So to escape Cthulu will have to persuade Charon to ferry him, and Charon is on the other side of the Styx and does not ferry anyone, other than Orpheus, back the other way. I rather think instead that Charon is rowing around Pluto laughing at Cthulu's impotence.
"where's the River Styx?"
From Wikipedia (where else?) on "Moons of Pluto":
"The dwarf planet Pluto has five known moons. In order of distance from Pluto they are Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra"
Can't help you with the frogs, I'm afraid.
Pluto's surface is smooth with a load of crap that's fallen on top of it because it's a hull of the now-dead drive and gravitational core of a mini travelling planet system pair, Charon being the habitable part of the ship right up until it got hit (that big Mordor crater) with the massive peanut of doom that killed the crew, left the thing drifting unpiloted until it got captured by our sun's gravity, hence the hinky orbit.
And because it's really old everything has rusted away or evaporated so you would need someone to go there and dig a bit and use one of those little brushes because obviously you won't be able to see the controls from way up in orbit.
"We originally thought Charon might be a heavily cratered terrain," she said. "It wasn't. What we saw just blew our socks off."
I'm presuming they were proper 80's white socks. And where are the pics of Pluto's sixth moon, Traevor?
Gosh, is that the time, I really must be going...
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
