Mountains on Pluto? Who Ordered Those?

It Just Gets Better and Better

I live on the side of an 11,000-foot peak in Colorado. That’s how tall the solar system’s newly discovered mountains on Pluto tower over the frozen landscape.

Imagine that.

Mountains on Pluto. That’s what New Horizons found there. And showed us this week.

To employ a well-known question we’ve heard a LOT this week: who ordered that?  And, what ELSE is it going to show us?

On Earth, mountains imply geologic activity. Tectonism. Or even volcanism. But, out at Pluto? It’s going to be an interesting time as the planetary scientists assimilate everything they’re learning and understand how it all works. But, the good news is, it all works according to the laws of physics, the geological laws, chemistry laws, and so on. In other words, it’s all going to be explained by science, just as it should be. And that’s just darned cool!

And, that’s not all: Charon has smooth areas that look relatively young, meaning that there’s activity inside this moon. What’s causing that?  There could be a few explanations. The one that comes to mind immediately is “radiogenic heating”, which is driven by the decay of radioactive elements inside, likely leftover from when Charon (and Pluto) formed. The same process could be at work inside Pluto, too.

It’s not likely that they’d be heated from the same kinds of tidal forces that heat up Enceladus or Triton, since the two worlds are locked in a synchronous orbit. Long story short, it’s going to be very interesting to determine just what’s keeping these two worlds so far from the Sun active enough to cause recent changes to their surfaces. Stay tuned!

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