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Kuiper Belt - Blog Posts
Solar System 10 Things: Looking Back at Pluto
In July 2015, we saw Pluto up close for the first time and—after three years of intense study—the surprises keep coming. “It’s clear,” says Jeffery Moore, New Horizons’ geology team lead, “Pluto is one of the most amazing and complex objects in our solar system.”
1. An Improving View
These are combined observations of Pluto over the course of several decades. The first frame is a digital zoom-in on Pluto as it appeared upon its discovery by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930. More frames show of Pluto as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope. The final sequence zooms in to a close-up frame of Pluto taken by our New Horizons spacecraft on July 14, 2015.
2. The Heart
Pluto’s surface sports a remarkable range of subtle colors are enhanced in this view to a rainbow of pale blues, yellows, oranges, and deep reds. Many landforms have their own distinct colors, telling a complex geological and climatological story that scientists have only just begun to decode. The image resolves details and colors on scales as small as 0.8 miles (1.3 kilometers). Zoom in on the full resolution image on a larger screen to fully appreciate the complexity of Pluto’s surface features.
3. The Smiles
July 14, 2015: New Horizons team members Cristina Dalle Ore, Alissa Earle and Rick Binzel react to seeing the spacecraft's last and sharpest image of Pluto before closest approach.
4. Majestic Mountains
Just 15 minutes after its closest approach to Pluto, the New Horizons spacecraft captured this near-sunset view of the rugged, icy mountains and flat ice plains extending to Pluto's horizon. The backlighting highlights more than a dozen layers of haze in Pluto's tenuous atmosphere. The image was taken from a distance of 11,000 miles (18,000 kilometers) to Pluto; the scene is 780 miles (1,250 kilometers) wide.
5. Icy Dunes
Found near the mountains that encircle Pluto’s Sputnik Planitia plain, newly discovered ridges appear to have formed out of particles of methane ice as small as grains of sand, arranged into dunes by wind from the nearby mountains.
6. Glacial Plains
The vast nitrogen ice plains of Pluto’s Sputnik Planitia – the western half of Pluto’s “heart”—continue to give up secrets. Scientists processed images of Sputnik Planitia to bring out intricate, never-before-seen patterns in the surface textures of these glacial plains.
7. Colorful and Violent Charon
High resolution images of Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, show a surprisingly complex and violent history. Scientists expected Charon to be a monotonous, crater-battered world; instead, they found a landscape covered with mountains, canyons, landslides, surface-color variations and more.
8. Ice Volcanoes
One of two potential cryovolcanoes spotted on the surface of Pluto by the New Horizons spacecraft. This feature, known as Wright Mons, was informally named by the New Horizons team in honor of the Wright brothers. At about 90 miles (150 kilometers) across and 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) high, this feature is enormous. If it is in fact an ice volcano, as suspected, it would be the largest such feature discovered in the outer solar system.
9. Blue Rays
Pluto's receding crescent as seen by New Horizons at a distance of 120,000 miles (200,000 kilometers). Scientists believe the spectacular blue haze is a photochemical smog resulting from the action of sunlight on methane and other molecules in Pluto's atmosphere. These hydrocarbons accumulate into small haze particles, which scatter blue sunlight—the same process that can make haze appear bluish on Earth.
10. Encore
On Jan. 1, 2019, New Horizons will fly past a small Kuiper Belt Object named MU69 (nicknamed Ultima Thule)—a billion miles (1.5 billion kilometers) beyond Pluto and more than four billion miles (6.5 billion kilometers) from Earth. It will be the most distant encounter of an object in history—so far—and the second time New Horizons has revealed never-before-seen landscapes.
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.
The Science Has Spoken: Pluto Will Never Be A Planet Again
“What’s perhaps most remarkable is that we can make a simple, mathematical relationship between a world’s mass and its orbital distance that can be scaled and applied to any star. If you’re above these lines, you’re a planet; if you’re below it, you’re not. Note that even the most massive dwarf planets would have to be closer to the Sun than Mercury is to reach planetary status. Note by how fantastically much each of our eight planets meets these criteria… and by how much all others miss it. And note that if you replaced the Earth with the Moon, it would barely make it as a planet.”
It was a harsh lesson in astronomy for all of us in 2006, when the International Astronomical Union released their official definition of a planet. While the innermost eight planets made the cut, Pluto did not. But given the discovery of large numbers of worlds in the Kuiper belt and beyond our Solar System, it became clear that we needed something even more than what the IAU gave us. We needed a way to look at any orbiting worlds around any star and determine whether they met a set of objective criteria for reaching planetary status. Recently, Alan Stern spoke up and introduced a geophysical definition of a planet, which would admit more than 100 members in our Solar System alone. But how does this stand up to what astronomers need to know?
As it turns out, not very well. But the IAU definition needs improving, too, and modern science is more than up to the challenge. See who does and doesn’t make the cut into true planetary status, and whether Planet Nine – if real – will make it, too!
Infographic about Planet 9, the required planet to explain the trajectory of six of the most distand known Kuiper Belt Objects.
Source: http://imgur.com/S5faizX
Earth is a super special world. It has life on it, and getting conditions just right so that life will survive is an incredibly difficult task. Other planets and other moons in our solar system may look like they could have life on them, but it just didn’t happen.
Life on other planets is for a different episode, though. In this one, I’m talking about what we can see on our close neighbors, the eight (maybe seven?) planets in our solar system. Learn how they were discovered, what naming conventions we use for them and their moons, how to differentiate between them, and what probes we’ve sent out to learn more about them. Also enjoy snippets from the lovely orchestral suite written for each planet by Gustav Holst! It’s the longest episode so far but I promise it’s worth it.
There’s a timeline below the cut in addition to the other resources because hooboy did I mention a lot of people. I may also put together a timeline of probes... But that’s for another podcast. Maybe the next podcast! Let me know what you think I should research by messaging me here, tweeting at me at @HDandtheVoid, or asking me to my face if you know me in real life. And please check out the podcast on iTunes, rate it or review it if you’d like, subscribe, and maybe tell your friends about it if you think they’d like to listen! Also below the cut are my sources, music credits, vocab list, and the transcript. I mention a book, a play, a poem, and a few works of art, and I quote an astronomy book in this episode so if you want to see that written down, those sources are there as well.
(My thoughts for the next episode were spectroscopy, auroras, or probes through the ages. Let me know by the 21st and I’ll have the next podcast up by July 31!)
Glossary:
auroras - a light display that occurs when a magnetosphere is sufficiently disturbed by solar wind that charged particles scatter into the upper atmosphere and lose their energy.
magnetosphere - an invisible barrier that surrounds a celestial objet. It is often generated by the movement of the liquid metal core of the object. Around a planet, it deflects high-energy, charged particles called cosmic rays that can either come from the Sun or, less often, from interstellar space.
prograde - when a planet spins from east to west.
retrograde - when a planet spins from west to east.
sol - a unit of time measuring one Martian day, or 24 Earth-hours and 40 Earth-minutes. The immediately previous Martian day is called yestersol.
transit of Mercury/Venus - when a planet passes in front of the Sun.
Script/Transcript
Timeline of people mentioned
Nicolaus Copernicus, Polish (1473-1543)
Tycho Brahe, Danish (1541-1601)
Galileo Galilei, Italian (1564-1642)
Johannes Kepler, German (1571-1630)
Simon Marius, German (1573-1625)
Pierre Gassendi, French (1592-1655)
Giovanni Cassini (also known as Jean-Dominique Cassini), Italian/French (1625-1712)
Christiaan Huygens, Dutch (1629-1695)
William Herschel, German/English (1738-1822)
Johann Elert Bode, German (1747-1826)
Caroline Herschel, German/English (1750-1848)
Johann Franz Encke, German (1791-1865)
John Herschel, English (1792-1871)
William Lassell, English (1799-1880)
Urbain Le Verrier, French (1811-1877)
Johann Galle, German (1812-1910)
John Couch Adams, English (1819-1892)
Edouard Roche, French (1820-1883)
Heinrich Louis d’Arrest, German (1822-1875)
Asaph Hall III, American (1829-1907)
James Clark Maxwell, Scottish (1831-1879)
Giovanni Schiaparelli, Italian (1835-1910)
Percival Lowell, American (1855-1916)
Eugène Antoniadi (also known as Eugenios Antoniadis), Greek (1870-1944)
Gerard Kuiper, Dutch/American (1905-1973)
Clyde Tombaugh (1906-1997)
Sources:
Who discovered each planet via Cornell University
The mathematical discovery of Neptune and Pluto via University of St. Andrews, where my mom’s boyfriend’s son graduated last year! Mad props, Henry!
Holst’s The Planets via the Utah Symphony
More on Holst’s suite, including music files
Chronology of solar system discovery
MESSENGER information via John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
Auroras via NASA’s Themis mission
Magnetospheres via NASA, which has a tumblr! You should follow it! Good stuff.
Curiosity rover via NASA
‘Canali on Mars’ debacle via NASA
Mariner 9 via NASA
Origin of ‘yestersol’ and Martian day-length via A Way With Words
Richard Bram: “Superlatives are inadequate; words fail. Look. Think. Be in awe.”
Images of Mars through the years via The Telegraph
Mars-One mission to colonize Mars
Names of all the planet’s moons and their significance in mythology, last updated in 2013 and questionably reliable but from what I know of mythology—and I do know more than most—it’s not too far off.
Table of moons of various planets
Jupiter via NASA
Jupiter moon name facts via NASA
The Galilean Moons of Jupiter via University of Colorado at Boulder
Saturn’s moons via Phys.org
Cassini mission website
Saturn overview via NASA
Saturn’s moon Titan via NASA
Ethane via PubChem
Methane via EPA
Neptune’s moons via Space.com
What is Pluto via NASA
Pluto Overview via NASA
“Dwarf planets may provide the best evidence about the origins of our solar system.”
New Horizons mission via NASA
Pluto and our designations for planets are mentioned very briefly in this Oatmeal comic. I liked it.
Sobel, Dava. The Planets. Viking: NY, 2005.
“But tides raised by the Sun in the planet’s molten middle gradually damped Mercury’s rotation down to its present slow gait” (34).
“Light and heat always hit Mercury dead on, while the north and south poles, which receive no direct sunlight, remain relatively frigid at all times” (35).
“Venusian clouds comprise large and small droplets of real vitriol—sulfuric acid along with caustic compounds of chlorine and fluorine. They precipitate a constant acid rain, called virga, that evaporates in Venus’ hot, arid air before it has a chance to strike the ground” (61).
“…Neptune, where the voices of a female choir, sequestered in a room offstage, are made to fade out at the finale (with no sacrifice in pitch) by the slow, silent closing of a door” (165).
Holst: “Saturn brings not only physical decay but also a vision of fulfillment” (165).
“They occupy a nearby region of perpetual fragmentation known as the Roche zone, named for the nineteenth-century French astronomer Edouard Roche, who formulated the safe distances for planetary satellites” (172).
“It's near twin, Neptune, reveals a more complex beauty in subtle stripes and spots of royal to navy blue, azure, turquoise, and aquamarine” (200).
“This outlying population offered Pluto a new identity—if not the last planet, then the first citizen of a distant teeming shore” (214).
Van Gogh, Vincent. Starry Night (June 1889).
—. Road with Cypress and Star (May 1890).
—. White House at Night (June 1890).
Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1605).
Pope, Alexander. “The Rape of the Lock” (1712). (It’s a mock-epic satiric poem about stealing a lock of hair, not physical rape)
Duane, Diane. Wizards at War. Harcourt Trade Publishers: San Diego CA, 2005.
Intro Music: ‘Better Times Will Come’ by No Luck Club off their album Prosperity
Filler Music: The Planets (1918) by Gustav Holst, performed by the London Symphony Orchestra in 2003.
Outro Music: ‘Fields of Russia’ by Mutefish off their album On Draught