The images show what appeared to be an enormous valentine heart on its surface, a beacon of love to the far reaches of the Solar System.
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Arguably, the single most remarkable thing humanity discovered about Pluto during New Horizon’s historic flyby past year was that the dwarf planet had a massive heart.
Pluto’s “heart” isn’t exactly the Valentine’s-worthy kind, scientists reveal in a new study. The model helped explain some of New Horizons’ observations of the tiny, icy world.
The depths of Hellas Basin on Mars, snapped here by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, accumulates ice and frost – like Sputnik Planum.
The large, bright, somewhat-heart-shaped patch of mostly nitrogen ice was spotted on the dwarf planet in July 2015, when NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft snapped a now-famous image.
Their model shows that the solid-gas equilibrium of nitrogen is responsible for trapping ice in Sputnik Planum.
According to the researchers, that chasm acts as a kind of cold trap, collecting ice into its reaches, and in particular nitrogen and carbon monoxide. With Pluto’s high-and-low topography accounted for as part of the simulation – including the depths of the Sputnik Planum basin and two other significant craters – the researchers sat back and watched as the millennia flew by.
“We predict with the model that atmospheric pressure is at its seasonal peak and will decrease in the next decades, and that the seasonal frosts of methane will tend to disappear”, Mr Bertrand said.
“Our knowledge of what is on Pluto’s surface does not change, but we know now why it is here and not there”, Tanguy Bertrand, who is co-author of the paper and a PhD student at Paris’ Université Pierre et Marie Curie, told Gizmodo. “At the bottom of the basin the pressure of the atmosphere-and therefore of gaseous nitrogen-is higher, thus the frost temperature is higher than the outside”. Because of its volatility similar to that of nitrogen, carbon monoxide ice is entirely sequestered with nitrogen in the basin, in keeping with the New Horizons measurements.
This scenario shows that there is no need for an internal reservoir of nitrogen ice to explain the formation of the Sputnik Planum glacier, as suggested by previous studies.
“Observing Pluto in the next years will validate or challenge our model”.
Unlike the polar caps, the Sputnik Planum glacier isn’t going anywhere.
The end result, if you were to film a time-lapse video of Pluto over hundreds of years? In addition, it is fascinating to note that the massive glacier that makes up much of the heart will change shape with time, enlarging and shrinking like a heart beating.
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How awesome. Pluto, our hearts are melting for you too.
