Do You Know What Color Pluto Really Is?
Way out past Neptune, New Horizons is flying through the attic of our solar system… where we keep all the ancient building blocks of life and planets. How do we know? Because we can see red. Hello dwarf planet fans, Ian here for DNews, taking some time to check in on NASA's most daring space probe that's currently digging deep into some of the solar system's most ancient artifacts. After launching in 2006, NASA's New Horizons mission took nearly a decade to reach the outer solar system to fly past Pluto. Then the nuclear-powered spacecraft zipped through Pluto's system and saw many strange and wonderful things. Probably the biggest shocker was Pluto has a kind of rusty color. Mars now has some competition! Who would have guessed Pluto would be the second “red planet” located in the solar system's badlands -- way out there in the Kuiper Belt. This is surprising because up until 2015, astronomers only had a very blurry, fuzzy idea about what the tiny world looked like. We thought it was an icy rocky body, but there's so much more... Data is still being beamed back to Earth from that famous flyby and planetary scientists have been blown away by the incredible discoveries that have been made. Although Pluto is located almost 40 times further away from the sun than the Earth, it is far from being a frozen, static wasteland; it has vast plains of slow-moving ices, wondrous mountain ranges and it even has a thin atmosphere that appears to create wispy clouds above its surface!
Its system of moons ARE also rich and varied tiny worlds in their own right. It's cold, but it's not boring. The reason Pluto is red, it seems, has something to do with tholins! Tholins are an organic compound. They can form the backbone of amino acids, and while they're not life as such, they are certainly organic molecules! Scientists think that the tholins on Pluto's surface are formed when ultraviolet light from the sun breaks down methane and nitrogen in the dwarf planet's thin atmosphere. These tholins then rained down turning its surface a browny red. From an astrobiology standpoint, tholins are really interesting as they are a critical ingredient for life as we know it. And the fact New Horizons has found Pluto is covered in the stuff underscores the surprisingly active atmospheric chemistry that's going on super far away from the sun. No one really expected this stuff to happen on Pluto!
The more you think about it, the more confusing it can get, because tholins can't form in Earth's atmosphere. Instead, we may have had tholins delivered to us by comets and asteroids, possibly forming the backbone of life here billions of years ago. So even though New Horizons already flew by Pluto, there's a lot more to learn. It's now on track to make an EVEN CLOSER flyby of another object deep in the Kuiper Belt called 2014 MU69. And, MU69 is even redder than Pluto! Scientists will be absolutely checking to see if its redness is also caused by the presence of tholins. MU69 is ancient, and has occupied the Kuiper Belt since the dawn of the solar system. If this little frozen red rock is also covered in tholins, then it too may have these building blocks for life. But what does that mean? We talked to the New Horizons team and they said we won't know until we get there. We are truly at the raggedy edge of science discovery, where a robotic probe is pushing deep into the unexplored Kuiper belt and also deep into the ancient history of our solar system.
Its system of moons ARE also rich and varied tiny worlds in their own right. It's cold, but it's not boring. The reason Pluto is red, it seems, has something to do with tholins! Tholins are an organic compound. They can form the backbone of amino acids, and while they're not life as such, they are certainly organic molecules! Scientists think that the tholins on Pluto's surface are formed when ultraviolet light from the sun breaks down methane and nitrogen in the dwarf planet's thin atmosphere. These tholins then rained down turning its surface a browny red. From an astrobiology standpoint, tholins are really interesting as they are a critical ingredient for life as we know it. And the fact New Horizons has found Pluto is covered in the stuff underscores the surprisingly active atmospheric chemistry that's going on super far away from the sun. No one really expected this stuff to happen on Pluto!
The more you think about it, the more confusing it can get, because tholins can't form in Earth's atmosphere. Instead, we may have had tholins delivered to us by comets and asteroids, possibly forming the backbone of life here billions of years ago. So even though New Horizons already flew by Pluto, there's a lot more to learn. It's now on track to make an EVEN CLOSER flyby of another object deep in the Kuiper Belt called 2014 MU69. And, MU69 is even redder than Pluto! Scientists will be absolutely checking to see if its redness is also caused by the presence of tholins. MU69 is ancient, and has occupied the Kuiper Belt since the dawn of the solar system. If this little frozen red rock is also covered in tholins, then it too may have these building blocks for life. But what does that mean? We talked to the New Horizons team and they said we won't know until we get there. We are truly at the raggedy edge of science discovery, where a robotic probe is pushing deep into the unexplored Kuiper belt and also deep into the ancient history of our solar system.
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