Althouse: "Water-ice at Pluto temperatures is strong enough to hold up big mountains."

July 15, 2015

"Water-ice at Pluto temperatures is strong enough to hold up big mountains."

Mountains as high as the Rockies, seen close-up, for the first time, today.

16 comments:

YoungHegelian said...: Okay, so what the hell is the source of heat to create geological activity? Seemingly, quite a lot of it if the surface has been so "recently" re-paved that there aren't any crater impacts & mountains have been pushed up.

I'm glad I'm not the guy to figure this one out, 'cause I'm coming up empty here. My only guess: that Pluto has a metallic core, but I don't know if that holds up with other observed phenomena.; 7/15/15, 9:39 PM
Sam L. said...: Looked it up; the gravity of Pluto is .06 that of earth. Makes it easy to hold up large landforms.; 7/15/15, 9:49 PM
Ignorance is Bliss said...: YoungHegelian said...

Okay, so what the hell is the source of heat to create geological activity?

My guess would be tidal forces from Charon; 7/15/15, 9:52 PM
Original Mike said...: "I'm glad I'm not the guy to figure this one out,"

I'd love to be the guy who gets to come to work everyday (and collects a paycheck every month), tasked with figuring this out.

There are times, when the research is going well, when you look around the lab and exclaim "we get paid to do this!"; 7/15/15, 10:40 PM
Smilin' Jack said...: Okay, so what the hell is the source of heat to create geological activity?

My guess would be tidal forces from Charon

Pluto and Charon are tidally locked, so there is no tidal heating. The only other plausible source is radioactive material in the core, such as (duh!) plutonium, which even now the Plutonians are fashioning into warheads to pay us back for all that "dwarf planet" shit. Good luck to Obama in negotiating his way out of this one!; 7/16/15, 12:32 AM
Lewis Wetzel said...: The density of Pluto is about 0.3 of Mercury. Mercury doesn't have active geology. Mercury still has craters that are billions of years old. Must be something to do with Pluto having ice rather than stone on its surface. Or maybe it gets wacked once in a while.; 7/16/15, 1:48 AM
Original Mike said...: @Smilin' Jack - Plutonium! Of course!; 7/16/15, 5:23 AM
Curious George said...: "Prof Stern said the discovery would "send a lot of geophysicists back to the drawing boards"."

Hey, there was consensus. Prof Stern sounds like a denier. Burn him!; 7/16/15, 7:30 AM
Tibore said...: "Terry said...
...Must be something to do with Pluto having ice rather than stone on its surface. Or maybe it gets wacked once in a while."

Yeah, NASA tweeted a post musing along those same lines:
"Something's active. Volcanism, migrating ice, latent heat from possible internal ocean???"

https://twitter.com/NASANewHorizons/status/621439947170578432

No one knows for certain, but I'm sure that's got a lot of planetary geologists excited. Fertile ground for a lot of new theorizing and research.; 7/16/15, 9:18 AM
Tibore said...: Oooo, intermittent tidal friction from Uranus. That's something I hadn't thought of before before.

And yes, Uranus, not Neptune. Because Pluto passes closest to that planet - 11 AU - when it's orbit pulls inward. In contrast, the closest it gets to Neptune is 30 AU, despite Uranus being the one closer to the Sun.

Of course, that's just a hypothesis - or hell, let's go all the way and just call it a wild-ass guess, which is probably closer to the mark - but it's fascinating food for thought anyway.; 7/16/15, 9:29 AM
Carter Wood said...: They are H.P. Lovecraft's Mountains of Madness.; 7/16/15, 9:32 AM
Ignorance is Bliss said...: Tibore said...

Oooo, intermittent tidal friction from Uranus.

...

Of course, that's just a hypothesis - or hell, let's go all the way and just call it a wild-ass guess...

So in other words, you're just pulling it out of Uranus?; 7/16/15, 9:33 AM
Kyzer SoSay said...: LOL @ IiB

My guess would be latent subsurface heat from when the two bodies were not yet tidally locked, combined with decay from ancient radioisotopes in the core. I really wish we could have launched a second, less advanced probe a few years after New Horizons went up. Just some cameras, maybe one more instrument, nothing tooooo fancy. That way we could get a second set of pictures and maybe see if something had changed.; 7/16/15, 2:28 PM
mikee said...: Today's comic at http://xkcd.com/1551/ gives the best descriptions of the planet's features I've seen.; 7/16/15, 4:25 PM
Sammy Finkelman said...: Frozen water is a really strong material. Hard as a rock.

The only problem is it melts at 32 degrees Fahrenheit.; 7/16/15, 6:35 PM
Tibore said...: "Ignorance is Bliss said...

So in other words, you're just pulling it out of Uranus?"

Ahhhh, space puns. I've been eclipsed. Did you planet that way? ;); 7/16/15, 6:38 PM