NASA: New Hubble Maps of Pluto Show Surface Changes
Posted: Thu Feb 04, 2010 6:37 pm
APOD and General Astronomy Discussion Forum
https://asterisk.apod.com/
Well, not exactly...geckzilla wrote:It's still amazing to me that until New Horizons gets there, that's the best we can resolve Pluto.
For Hubble the relative resolution is twice as goodgeckzilla wrote:That's only a little better than Betelgeuse.
Infrared ground telescopes and interferometers are already pushing the envelope.geckzilla wrote:It will be interesting to see what limits future telescopes can push. Telescope technology seems to work opposite to computer technology.
Astronomers!!!geckzilla wrote:You can say it has about twice as much resolution but doubling a 6x6 pixel image still only gets you 12x12 pixels and to me that is just a little better... something about diminishing returns the smaller you get. Have a 1x1 pixel image increase by twice as much to 2x2? That's twice as much data too but it's even less impressive than the aforementioned 12 pixels.
Isn't that sweetgeckzilla wrote:Here, have an alliterating haiku written specially for you.
baby blurry blobs
befuddling, big blurry blobs
boring blurry blobs.
http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00002334/ wrote:
New maps of Pluto show pretty amazing amounts of surface change
By Emily Lakdawalla | Feb. 4, 2010
<<Pluto has shown an astonishing amount of changes across its surface between 1994 and 2002 -- more, in fact, than any other solid surface in the solar system. An interesting perspective on the announcement, which concerned four years of computational work done by Marc Buie, was provided by Mike Brown. Buie said that the view of Pluto that we have from his new maps was comparable in resolution to our naked-eye view of the Moon. Brown pointed out how strange it would be if the Moon appeared to change in our sky as much as Pluto did in the six years spanning the two sets of observations:
Comparison between 1994 and 2002-3 maps of Pluto
This animation blinks back and forth between two maps of Pluto's surface derived from Hubble Space Telescope observations. One map was generated from four images captured in 1994 using Hubble's Faint Object Camera, while the other was generated from 192 images captured in 2002 and 2003 using Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys. During the time that separated the two sets of observations, Pluto's surface changed noticeably. Also, the season advanced, bringing more of the south pole into winter darkness. Credit: NASA / ESA / M. Buie (SwRI) / animation by Emily Lakdawalla
Mike Brown, who goes by the Twitter handle "@plutokiller," was actually Tweeting away during the parts of the press briefing when he wasn't talking. (Tweeting while talking is something even he doesn't seem to be able to do -- and yes, that's a challenge, Mike.) So I Tweeted a question to him, about what question he thought I should ask at the briefing. He responded, recommending I ask why Pluto's northern hemisphere brightened. It was a question that apparently has stumped both Buie and Brown, and Buie's response to it provided one of the more imaginatively arresting phrases of the briefing: he speculated that as nitrogen sublimates from the northern hemisphere, it leaves behind a landscape of "fairy castle" spires of remnant nitrogen ice.
Coool! I can't wait until New Horizons gets there! Only five more years!>>
Most likely Pluto's just going to be a slightly smaller & darker Tritongeckzilla wrote:The change is very interesting, indeed. The images themselves, alone, without that change? Blobtastic. I know I sound negative here, but all I really want to convey is that I really, really want some high res photos of Pluto. Can you really fault me? I mean, look at my generation. We're completely spoiled on resolution.
Code: Select all
______ radius density Albedo Surface temp.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Pluto 1153 2.03 0.58 44 K
Triton 1353 2.06 0.76 38 K
I'm quite happy imagining that Pluto looks more or less like Triton to wait the five years.geckzilla wrote:Now I'm surprised to hear that from you. That's almost like saying "Once you've seen one Galilean moon, you've seen them all." but we know they all four have strikingly different characteristics.
And this from the person who just stated:geckzilla wrote:And there's certainly plenty we don't know about Triton so even if they are exactly the same we couldn't say that we know much about Pluto. Besides, we also need better pictures in order to compare Pluto to some kind of terrestrial object. I'm looking forward to your image associations for Pluto.
By the way, someone updated the Wikipedia article with the new Pluto picture.
It does look a lot better than the old disco ball one.
But the new glamour shots won't be enough to get Pluto registered again as a planet.
The most detailed view of the surface of Pluto, assembled from Hubble images taken of different sides of Pluto in 2002 and 2003, shows that the dwarf planet had reddened, and researchers aren’t sure why. The mosaic also shows a bright spot (center of middle image) unusually rich in carbon monoxide that has persisted on Pluto since the 1950s.
The 180 degrees longitude face away from Charon.bystander wrote: Science News: 2010 Feb 04
<<The most detailed view of the surface of Pluto, assembled from Hubble images taken of different sides of Pluto in 2002 and 2003, shows that the dwarf planet had reddened, and researchers aren’t sure why. The mosaic also shows a bright spot (center of middle image) unusually rich in carbon monoxide that has persisted on Pluto since the 1950s.>>
http://www.boulder.swri.edu/~buie/pluto/chphases.html wrote:
<<The length of Pluto's day is exactly the same as Charon's orbital period. That means Pluto always presents the same face toward Charon and Charon always presents the same face toward Pluto. This is just what our own Moon does. What is different, is that standing on Pluto, Charon does not appear to move relative to the horizon. That's because Charon orbits over Pluto's equator. Charon has the same type of orbit we use here near the Earth for communication satellites. This geometry means you never see a moonrise from Pluto's surface. This also means that over half the planet, you can never see Charon. The longitude system is defined such that 0 degrees longitude is in the center of the hemisphere that can see Charon. So, from 180 degrees you wouldn't see any phases at all.>>
http://kencroswell.com/NitrogenInPlutosAtmosphere.html wrote:
_Nitrogen in Pluto's Atmosphere_ By Ken Croswell
Published in New Scientist (June 20, 1992, page 19).
<<Pluto is the only planet apart from Earth with an atmosphere consisting mostly of nitrogen, say astronomers from the U.S. and Europe. Their discovery offers clues to the origin of the solar system, because Pluto has changed little since its birth.
Pluto's atmosphere was confirmed in 1988 when the planet passed in front of a star and dimmed the star's light gradually rather than abruptly (New Scientist, June 30, 1988). However, this event could not reveal the identity of the atmospheric gases.
Now a team of astronomers, led by Tobias Owen of the University of Hawaii, has discovered nitrogen ice on Pluto's surface (International Astronomical Union Circular, No. 5532). In the weak sunlight illuminating Pluto, some of the nitrogen ice must vaporize to produce a nitrogen atmosphere around the planet.
Owen and his colleagues observed Pluto on the nights of May 27 and 28 using the U.K. Infrared Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. They detected a weak spectral line at 2.15 micrometers, a wavelength absorbed by nitrogen ice.
Methane ice was discovered on Pluto in 1976, so methane gas must also make up part of its atmosphere. Owen's team found many spectral lines due to methane, which is easier to detect than nitrogen. But Owen and his colleagues say the dominant gas in Pluto's atmosphere must be nitrogen. Nitrogen has a much greater vapor pressure than methane, and the vapor pressure indicates the ease with which a solid can become gaseous at a given temperature. If Pluto's surface harbors both nitrogen ice and methane ice, Pluto's atmosphere must contain more nitrogen gas than methane gas, say the astronomers.
Owen's team also discovered carbon monoxide ice on Pluto. Carbon monoxide has a vapor pressure intermediate between that of nitrogen and methane, so Owen and his colleagues believe that carbon monoxide is the second most abundant gas in Pluto's atmosphere.
"I think the discovery is very important," says Jonathan Lunine of the University of Arizona. He notes that interstellar clouds contain nitrogen, carbon monoxide, and methane--just as Pluto and Neptune's biggest moon Triton do. "What we're seeing is that these very cold, outermost objects have probably retained a lot of the original molecular mix of the interstellar cloud from which the solar system formed," he says. "So one can use these objects as chemical probes of the processes by which the solar system originated."
Two worlds, other than the Earth and Pluto, have nitrogen atmospheres, but they are moons rather than planets: Titan, Saturn's biggest moon, and Triton. Like Pluto, Triton also has carbon monoxide ice.
"Pluto and Triton seem to have the same substances on their surfaces and in their atmospheres," says Lunine, "and that strongly suggests Pluto and Triton are of the same ilk." Since 1989, astronomers have known that Pluto and Triton also have nearly the same size, mass, and density.>>
Well that would explain Puppis (the Poop).
New Horizons: 80 Years of PlutoPluto was discovered 80 years ago today, and astronomers are still arguing over what it is.
The oddball world, downgraded from planet to dwarf planet status in 2006 and then later reclassified, is really out there. Scientists aren't sure exactly what Pluto's made of, how it formed, or why it orbits so oddly compared to the eight primary planets. And there are at least two camps of astronomers when it comes to defining Pluto. Some just think of it as a planet, others call it a dwarf planet or a plutoid.
While NASA has a spacecraft en route to Pluto and slated to make close-up images in 2015, the best images of Pluto so far, taken this year by the Hubble Space Telescope, are mere smudges.
On February 18, 1930, while examining photographic plates of the sky, American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh saw a tiny spot of light moving slowly against the fixed pattern of stars in the constellation Gemini: it was Pluto. Read more about man who found the ninth planet and the events that led to his discovery of a whole new class of planetary object.
Lonely Pluto floats in the darkness at the edge of our solar system. It's so far away even the Hubble Space Telescope has trouble making out the details. Nevertheless, Pluto is so interesting, even fuzzy images of the dwarf planet are compelling.
A team of researchers led by Marc Buie of the Southwest Research Institute recently released the best Hubble images to date: http://asterisk.apod.com/vie ... 93#p115467
The data reveal an icy molasses-colored world with a surprising amount of activity. Buie compared Hubble images taken in 1994 vs. 2003 and discovered that Pluto's northern hemisphere has brightened while the southern hemisphere has dimmed. Ground-based observations suggest that Pluto's atmosphere doubled in mass during approximately the same time period. And no one is certain what's causing the molasses-colored splotches on Pluto's surface.
When scientists got an unprecedented up-close view of Pluto from the Hubble telescope recently, they found mysterious bright and dark spots mottling the dwarf planet's surface. Now researchers think they have a better guess at what's causing those weird spots.
The Hubble images, released in February, revealed Pluto as a molasses-colored world on the fringe of the solar system with surprising variations in brightness across its surface. Based on closer analysis, scientists say the darker spots may represent parts of the ground covered in a tar of primordial organic compounds.
...
The bright spots, in turn, are thought to be related to areas covered in carbon monoxide frost.