It’s only been a few months since the discovery of ice geysers on Saturn’s moon Enceladus, and now astronomers think they’ve found a similar phenomenon on one of the strangest places: welling up from the surface of Pluto’s moon Charon! The discovery was made using the Gemini Observatory’s adaptive optics system from atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The telescope picked out large deposits of ammonia hydrates and water crystals spread out across the surface of the icy moon. Scientists think that water mixing with ice deep underneath Charon’s surface is causing this material to push up through the moon’s ultra-cold surface. This action could be happening quickly, taking just a few hours or even days. Over time, this process could give Charon a new surface one millimetre thick every 100.000 years. Of course, if Charon has this process going on, something similar could be happening across the Kuiper Belt.
Kategorie: Pluto
New Horizons probe makes its first Pluto sighting
The New Horizons team got a faint glimpse of the mission’s distant, main planetary target when one of the spacecraft’s telescopic cameras spotted Pluto for the first time:
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/112806.php