Category Archives: Pluto

Classifying My Thoughts about Pluto

Pluto and the Myth of a Planetary Status Vote

Pluto is a fascinating world; it's teaching us more about the hidden third realm of the solar system than any other place we know of. Courtesy NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI
Pluto is a fascinating world; it’s teaching us more about the hidden third realm of the solar system than any other place we know of. Courtesy NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI

In the days since we got back from the events surrounding Pluto Encounter, I’ve been thinking a lot about the issue of planetary status for our newly explored friend in the Kuiper Belt. I know a lot of people are signing petitions to get Pluto’s planetary status returned to “planet”, and at the same time the planetary scientists involved in New Horizons data are falling in love with Pluto and analyzing their treasure trove of actual, scientific information.

Of course, Pluto is the realm of planetary scientists. They’re the ones who have the qualifications to figure out what it is and what it’s doing. I’ve always thought that having a tiny percentage of people decide on something as fundamental as Pluto’s status when they weren’t all planetary scientists was the height of arrogance by the IAU. That organization encouraged a “vote” and a “decision” on something that had less to do with scientific inquiry and more (I suspect) to do with politics.

Since when do we VOTE on science facts? That’s a Republican Party kind of thing, sort of like voting to substitute myths for sound government policy, or to make pi equal to 3, or to reduce adult women to the legal equivalent of children when it comes to making their own scientific medical care decisions.

It’s a myth that you get to vote on planetary status. How is that scientific?

I mean, did IAU members vote on “star” or “galaxy”? What about “gravity”? Or “gas laws”? Or any of the other givens of science? Do they want to redefine Maxwell’s equations as “writings by some Scotsman”? They’d still be equations, right? Of course, that would be stupid. And arrogant. I dare say, if they decided that dwarf stars aren’t stars, the astronomers would be all over the IAU “leadership” like a cheap suit in nothing flat. It should be the same with “planet” and all its ramifications for what worlds are.

I’m not a member of IAU (they say no doctorate=no membership, no matter how well-educated in astronomy someone may be). So, I can look in from the outside and speculate about how silly it looked to vote on Pluto’s planetary status. As if it meant something to science.

Yes, I get that we use characteristics to define objects in the universe. Definitions are part of science. I get that and approve of it. But, voting on science? I don’t think so.

What’s important about Pluto is what that little world tells us. It’s a unique place. It has an evolutionary history that we’re still figuring out. It has mountains and an active atmosphere and ice flows and maybe even a subsurface ocean. Its processes are amazingly fascinating. And, it’s all happening in a place in the solar system where many scientists thought there might be just a dead world with an icy covering.

Pluto is the runaway surprise hit of the solar system. It’s bigger than our puny attempts to define it, to fit it into a single bin and forget about it. Pluto has something to show us, and is a HUGE piece in the puzzle of understanding our solar system and how ALL its components formed. THAT is something the IAU cannot take away.

So, let’s put this myth about voting over planetary status to rest. Let’s focus on what Pluto IS, and what it’s going to tell us. It’s opening the door to the third realm of the solar system. Like all those Europeans who once thought the Eastern shores of North America were all there was of the “new world”, the IAU can vote all it wants to define Pluto. But, I suspect Pluto will give us MORE than we ever expected. And, in the end science will win.

Exploring the Mountains of Pluto

Pluto’s Surface Has Changed Over Time

A newly discovered mountain range lies near the southwestern margin of Pluto’s Tombaugh Regio (Tombaugh Region), situated between bright, icy plains and dark, heavily-cratered terrain. This image was acquired by New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on July 14, 2015 from a distance of 48,000 miles (77,000 kilometers) and received on Earth on July 20. Features as small as a half-mile (1 kilometer) across are visible. Courtesy NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI
A newly discovered mountain range lies near the southwestern margin of Pluto’s Tombaugh Regio (Tombaugh Region), situated between bright, icy plains and dark, heavily-cratered terrain. This image was acquired by New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on July 14, 2015 from a distance of 48,000 miles (77,000 kilometers) and received on Earth on July 20. Features as small as a half-mile (1 kilometer) across are visible. Courtesy NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI

So, Pluto has a second set of mountains along one edge of Tombaugh Regio (the heart-shaped region). The planet continues to stun all of us with amazing views sent back by New Horizons, and the mountains are just the latest in a long string of discoveries to come. I can’t say I’m totally surprised to see them; I remember a geology teacher once saying where there’s one mountain range on a world, shaped by some kind of internal process, there’s bound to be another.

These mountains aren’t quite as high as the Norgay Montes, first seen on July 15th, but they’re still pretty spectacular-looking. They rise up to perhaps only a kilometer or so, but they look quite sharp, standing out in relief against the bright landscape. It looks like they may be younger than the surrounding landscape, but that’s just my guess. If so, then this surface is changing, indeed!

The thing that caught my eye after I checked out the mountains was that very interesting interface between the dark region and the brighter material that makes up Sputnik Planum (which is part of Tombaugh Regio). At first glance, I could tell that there’s been some filling in of craters by the white material. That’s another clue that the lighter-colored landscape is much younger than the darker regions. In fact, the team suspects the dark region is billions of years old, while the lighter landscape is less than a hundred million years old. That’s pretty young in planetary science terms, when you think about it. The solar system formed some 4.56 BILLION years ago, so this surface has only been around for a short time compared the age of the Sun and other worlds.

What Could Be Causing the Mountains on Pluto?

As I mentioned in my article of a few days back, called  Pluto is Geologically Active, mountain-building processes here on Earth are driven by plate tectonics, which is itself driven by heat and motions beneath the planet’s crust. We don’t know yet what’s driving it on Pluto. The planet is just about 70 percent rock, so it might be that there’s activity in the interior related to decay of radioactive materials or some other process.

If that activity generates or is driven by heat, that would affect the icy surface, possibly causing mountains to form in some way, and ices to flow to create smoothed-over landscapes. Remember, the ices on Pluto are largely nitrogen and methane, and those can melt and/or sublimate at pretty low temperatures, so you wouldn’t need a lot of heat. I look forward to hearing a more nuanced and scientifically informed interpretation of the images from the New Horizons team.

There will be a science press conference on the 24th (you can watch at NASA.TV), and I suspect we’ll hear more about those mountains and the dichotomy between the dark and light regions of the planet. So, as I like to say, stay tuned!

Note: the spacecraft has gathered 50 gigabits of data, which it will be sending back over the ever-increasing distance between it and the Earth over the next 16 months. At times, the spacecraft will be returning various types of data, not all of it imaging. However, the team will be releasing images as often as they can, generally once a week or so. The best way to keep up with the news from New Horizons is to check out www.nasa.gov/newhorizons and/or pluto.jhuapl.edu — where you’ll find images, videos, and discussions of the latest Pluto scientific discoveries.