“Houston, We Have Geology”

Pluto Lives!

The world is waking up to a vision of Pluto that now tells us this planet is a dynamic place — not a frozen desert, but a world with landscapes that are still just enough out of focus that it’s tough to tell exactly what they are. According to Alan Stern, the features in this image are indicative of something quite exciting. There appear to be complex surface structures pictured in this new image sent back by New Horizons just yesterday. “In this new image are what appear to be polygonal features, a complex band of terrain stretching east-northeast across the planet, approximately 1,000 miles long; and a complex region where bright terrains meet the dark terrains of the whale,” he said. “After nine and a half years in flight, Pluto is well worth the wait.”

The shapes we’re seeing on Pluto indicate some kind of geological activity, although the details are (forgive me) still a bit fuzzy. There are a number of things that can make these shapes you see on the icy surface. Think about what it looks like as ice and snow melt (sublimate) here on Earth. If you have a dirty snowbank, for example, the snow can melt preferentially, leaving strange shapes behind. On Pluto, there are mixtures of ice on the surface, and they all react a little differently to solar heating and UV light. Also, if you have a heated bit of ground on Earth, snow melts preferentially over that (and also refreezes when temperatures drop).

I honestly don’t know what’s doing the shaping of Pluto’s surface, but it’s a dynamic process (meaning it’s happening in real time). If that truly bears out, and we should know more soon, then Pluto is very  much a “living” world, perhaps in much the same way that Triton at Neptune continues to spew geysers from beneath its surface, or Enceladus at Saturn does the same thing. The big questions now are: what’s causing these surface features, and what’s causing that process? Stay tuned!

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