NASA Just found Something Huge Hiding out Behind Pluto - The Mission Has Just Begun (+Video)

NASA Just found Something Huge Hiding out Behind Pluto

NASA and the team behind its New Horizons spacecraft announced  that Pluto — the dwarf planet — has a giant tail.

A frigid cloud of ionized gases trailing an estimated 48,000 to 68,000 miles behind Pluto, according to a NASA press release. http://www.nasa.gov/nh/pluto-wags-its-tail

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.

The New Horizons spacecraft haS actually flown through this ‘tail’

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.

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Image credit: NASA