NASA Has Just Discovered Pluto Has A Giant Tail! Wowsers!
(NASA/APL/SwRI) Artist’s conception of the interaction of the solar wind with Pluto’s predominantly nitrogen atmosphere.
NASA and the team behind its New Horizons spacecraft announced today that Pluto — the dwarf planet — has a giant tail.
It’s not a physical tail like a dog’s, of course, but rather a frigid cloud of ionized gases trailing an estimated 48,000 to 68,000 miles behind Pluto, according to a NASA press release.
This giant tail is actually part of Pluto’s atmosphere. Except that the bits of atmosphere are being stripped away by solar wind, a torrent of electrically charged particles that constantly pours out of the sun in all directions.
“We see the atmosphere way far out,” Randy Gladstone, a New Horizons coinvestigator at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, said during a NASA press conference on Friday. “We see it from the ground out to 1,000 miles above the surface.”
Because Pluto is such a tiny planet — it’s a fraction of a percent as massive as the Earth — its atmosphere escapes directly into space, Gladstone said.
Gladstone and others discovered the tail after examining data from the Solar Wind Around Pluto (SWAP) instrument on the New Horizons spacecraft. The device found an anomaly in the solar wind around the dwarf planet: A depression composed of nitrogen ions. This depression is the tail, and it extends an unknown length behind the planet.
“We have actually flown through this [tail],” Fran Bagenal, a New Horizons coinvestigator from the University of Colorado at Boulder, said during the press conference.
Ionized gas forms when a bunch of energy pummels atmospheric atoms and molecules. This bombardment pops electrons off the atmospheric gas particles, allowing their electrons to freely circulate. The end result is plasma: A fourth state of matter after solids, liquids, and gases.
As far as we know, plasma is the most common state of matter in the universe. There’s simply a lot of energy pouring out of stars, and a lot of gas in space to form plasma. So while it might seem surprising, plasma tails like Pluto’s aren’t new. They even exist behind other planets in the solar system, including Venus and Mars.
The team still hasn’t determined the precise shape of Pluto’s newly discovered tail. They also don’t know exactly how the was formed.
So NASA is anxiously waiting for New Horizons to beam back more data. By August the team hopes to calculate how fast Pluto is losing its atmosphere to space — and, likewise, how quickly the icy world is shrinking.
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Interesting article, but I was sure I was getting punked clicking on this article. I fully expected to find Walt Disney’s dog before the page came up!
For the past 150,000 years or more, our solar system has been transiting through the Local Interstellar Plasma Cloud, but has recently left that cloud and is in the process of entering the adjoining Galactic Plasma Cloud. But since the LIC is 6,000 degrees K. and the G Cloud is 1,000,000 K., and because the properties of these two clouds are divergent, a compressed border area of “enhanced electron density” exists between them. Called the MIC, this turbulent zone is where our solar system is presently situated.
The electromagnetic turbulence of the MIC is agitating the way every heavenly body in our solar system (including the sun) functions. Little wonder then that Pluto is dragging a plasma cloud.
[Source: "Radio Scintillation in Local ISM" -- iopscience.org]
And I thought NASA are liars? But now it’s time to believe them again? I don’t get it. Do they or don’t they lie. Or is it just writers cherry picking again?
Different writers I assume. BIN doesn’t have a single coherent message and editor.
Depends. If we’re talking about Pluto’s tail, then there’s no reason to lie about that. BUT if we’re talking about a potential impact, then yes, they would lie about that. Even if it was only a small chance of impact, our society would resemble something out of the movie “These Final Hours” in short order.
maybe thats why they didnt consider it to be a planet anymore and the dwarf planet hypothesis just diversion