Wondrous dunes on Pluto are grains of frozen methane
WASHINGTON: Scientists have detected another exotic feature on one of the solar system’s most wondrous worlds, a large field of dunes on the surface of the distant, frigid dwarf planet Pluto apparently composed of wind-swept, sandsized grains of frozen methane.
The dunes, spotted on images taken by Nasa’s New Horizons spacecraft during its 2015 flyby, sit at the boundary between a heart-shaped nitrogen glacier about the size of France called Sputnik Planitia and the Al Idrisi Montes mountain range made of frozen water, scientists said on Thursday.
“Pluto, even though it’s so far away from Earth and so very cold, has a riot of processes we never expected to see. It is far more interesting than any of us dreamed, and tells us that these very distant bodies are well worth visiting,” Brigham Young University planetary scientist Jani Radebaugh said.
The dunes cover about 2000 square km, roughly the size of Tokyo. Their existence came as a surprise. There was some doubt about whether Pluto’s extremely thin atmosphere, mainly nitrogen with minor amounts of methane and carbon monoxide, could muster the wind needed to form such features.
Pluto, smaller than Earth’s moon with a diameter of about 2 380km, orbits roughly 5.8 billion km away from the sun, almost 40 times farther than Earth’s orbit, with a surface marked by plains, mountains, craters and valleys.
Methane, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and nitrogen, all gaseous on Earth, are rendered solid with Pluto’s temperatures near absolute zero.
Pluto’s dunes were shaped by moderate winds reaching around 35km/h, apparently blowing fine-grained frozen methane bits from mountaintops. The research appears in the journal Science. – Reuters