New Horizons

Originally posted by sonhouse
It's still pretty dam big! You certainly could not launch yourself off into space just by jumping up like you could on that comet they tagged with the probe.

Yeah, but the same would be true if you landed on Chris Christie's ass -- heaven forfend.

Originally posted by sonhouse
It's still pretty dam big! You certainly could not launch yourself off into space just by jumping up like you could on that comet they tagged with the probe.

There are several other known bodies of similar size and probably a number not yet discovered, yet there are not many people pushing for them to be called planets. If anything the resistance to them being called planets is what got Pluto demoted.

It also must be mentioned that the giant planets are so significantly bigger than the rest that we really should treat them differently too.
We should stop thinking of the 'nine planets' (or eight) and instead think:
2 Gas giants
2 Ice giants
5 Rocky planets
multiple dwarf planets (I don't know how many)
many comets
many asteroids
space dust.

And then there are all the moons of the above bodies
And then there are all the objects around other stars.

Originally posted by twhitehead
There are several other known bodies of similar size and probably a number not yet discovered, yet there are not many people pushing for them to be called planets. If anything the resistance to them being called planets is what got Pluto demoted.

It also must be mentioned that the giant planets are so significantly bigger than the rest that we really s ...[text shortened]... re are all the moons of the above bodies
And then there are all the objects around other stars.

And all that is dwarfed by the dark matter in the universe which outdoes the normal stuff we can see by 20 to 1 or so.

How are these pictures taken, since it should be pitch black given its distance from the sun?

Originally posted by vivify
How are these pictures taken, since it should be pitch black given its distance from the sun?

Actually no, the sun at the distance is still brighter than a full moon, light enough to read.

Nasa's recently been doing a thing where it will tell you [weather conditions permitting]
what time of day [morning and evening] will the conditions be right to experience the light
conditions you would find on Pluto at midday. [kinda]

http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/plutotime/

Specifically as Pluto is currently about ~31au away, the sun is 1/(31^2) or ~~1/900 times
as bright as it is at Earth.

Given the sensitivity of the instruments on these satellites.

Heck, they scheduled observations of Pluto's far night/dark side using reflected light from
it's moon after passing closest approach.


EDIT: the full midday sun on the Earth has a brightness of ~32,000 - ~100,000 lux
Which means at Pluto that drops to ~35 ~110 lux Or the equivalent of a very dark overcast day

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lux

http://www.greenbusinesslight.com/page/119/lux-lumens-and-watts

I came across this:
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33531811

Nasa's administrator Charles Bolden said: "With this mission, we have visited every single planet in the Solar System."

Clearly even some in NASA are not ready for the 'dwarf planet' category.
Eris, a dwarf planet more massive than Pluto (although very slightly smaller) has not been visited.

Originally posted by twhitehead
I came across this:
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33531811

Nasa's administrator Charles Bolden said: "With this mission, we have visited every single planet in the Solar System."

Clearly even some in NASA are not ready for the 'dwarf planet' category.
Eris, a dwarf planet more massive than Pluto (although very slightly smaller) has not been visited.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150715.html

The latest and greatest so far, Horizon is now sending back super high res pictures, all went well with the flyby.

Very interesting.

There seems to be a lot of rocks on Pluto.

Well I was not expecting this at all!! 😠

Originally posted by whodey
Very interesting.

There seems to be a lot of rocks on Pluto.

Well I was not expecting this at all!! 😠

Really, So far what I have seen have been labelled as water ice mountains... Which while very hard
are not in fact rocks.

They are interesting as Pluto has a [thin] atmosphere which is made up of mainly nitrogen which is
constantly being blasted off into space by solar wind. The atmosphere is replenished by more
nitrogen ice subliming and turning into gas.

However nitrogen ice is weak and cannot produce mountains like the ones we have just discovered,
which means that those mountains must be made of something stronger, like water ice.

However this means that the nitrogen ice on the surface can only be a [relatively] thin layer, which means
that if it were not being replenished it should have evaporated off by now, which means that Pluto must have
recent geological activity [cryo-volcanos for example] that brought more nitrogen ice to the surface.
This is born out by the lack of visible impact craters, indicating a young surface.

This is interesting because we didn't know such activity could sustain itself for so long after the formation of
the [object] as all other examples of such icy bodies are moons closely orbiting gas giants that cause
tidal heating that explained the geological activity.

Pluto is nowhere near a gas giant and the closest thing to it is too small to cause enough heating and is
tidally locked anyway.

So we have already discovered new things about Pluto that tell us about the workings of the solar system
and we only just started.

Originally posted by googlefudge
Really, So far what I have seen have been labelled as water ice mountains... Which while very hard
are not in fact rocks.

They are interesting as Pluto has a [thin] atmosphere which is made up of mainly nitrogen which is
constantly being blasted off into space by solar wind. The atmosphere is replenished by more
nitrogen ice subliming and turnin ...[text shortened]... ings about Pluto that tell us about the workings of the solar system
and we only just started.

Ice and nitrogen?

Well it's nice to know there is more than just rocks.

Some say Pluto has a heart shape on it but I say it's mooning us.

Originally posted by googlefudge
Really, So far what I have seen have been labelled as water ice mountains... Which while very hard
are not in fact rocks.

They are interesting as Pluto has a [thin] atmosphere which is made up of mainly nitrogen which is
constantly being blasted off into space by solar wind. The atmosphere is replenished by more
nitrogen ice subliming and turnin ...[text shortened]... ings about Pluto that tell us about the workings of the solar system
and we only just started.

What would be the source of the nitrogen? Nitrides in buried rocks? Not sure.

Originally posted by sonhouse
What would be the source of the nitrogen? Nitrides in buried rocks? Not sure.

I dunno but these nitrates are polluting the atmosphere.

Plutonians need to limit their nitrogen emissions.

Originally posted by whodey
I dunno but these nitrates are polluting the atmosphere.

Plutonians need to limit their nitrogen emissions.

To say you are a one-dimensional character would be an insult to that one dimension. Maybe you're fractional dimensional, like the Cantor set.