ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

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Pluto's famous heart powers icy winds on the dwarf planet

By Mike Wall

The heart is pumping nitrogen-dominated air around Pluto, according to a new study.





~ The left lobe of Pluto's heart-shaped feature is a 600-mile-wide (1,000 kilometers) ice plain known as Sputnik Planitia.

Pluto's icy heart is beating.

The dwarf planet's famous heart-shaped feature, which NASA's New Horizons spacecraft discovered during its epic July 2015 flyby, drives atmospheric circulation patterns on Pluto, a new study suggests.

Most of the action comes courtesy of the heart's left lobe, a 600-mile-wide (1,000 kilometers) nitrogen-ice plain called Sputnik Planitia. This exotic ice vaporizes during the day and condenses into ice again at night, causing nitrogen winds to blow, the researchers determined. (Pluto's atmosphere is dominated by nitrogen, like Earth's, though the dwarf planet's air is about 100,000 times thinner than the stuff we breathe.)

__ Below Pluto's 'Heart' A Slushy Ocean May Churn


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These winds carry heat, particles of haze and grains of ice westward, staining the ices there with dark streaks.

"This highlights the fact that Pluto's atmosphere and winds — even if the density of the atmosphere is very low — can impact the surface," study lead author Tanguy Bertrand, an astrophysicist and planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, said in a statement.

And that westward direction is interesting in itself, considering that Pluto spins eastward on its axis. The dwarf planet's atmosphere therefore exhibits an odd "retrorotation," study team members said.

Bertrand and his colleagues studied data gathered by New Horizons during the probe's 2015 close encounter. The researchers also performed computer simulations to model Pluto's nitrogen cycle and weather, especially the dwarf planet's winds.

_________Pluto Has Dunes! How Did They Form?


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New Horizons' Pluto flyby revealed that the dwarf planet is far more complex and diverse than anyone had thought, featuring towering water-ice mountains and weird "bladed" terrain in addition to the photogenic heart (whose official name, Tombaugh Regio, honors the discoverer of Pluto, Clyde Tombaugh).

The new study, which was published online Tuesday (Feb. 4) in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, reinforces and extends that basic message.

"Sputnik Planitia may be as important for Pluto's climate as the ocean is for Earth's climate," Bertrand said. "If you remove Sputnik Planitia — if you remove the heart of Pluto — you won't have the same circulation."
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~ Note from Bud: I'm amazed that poor little frozen Pluto actually has an ocean of liquid water down under the some of the areas covered by nitrogen ice, and that ice actually gets enough of the weak sunlight to partially melt on the day side as the dwarf planet rotates!

Jeez, is this a weird star system of what!?
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)