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In Part 3 of this four-part presentation,
physicist Eugene Bagashov continues his analysis
of the New Horizons mission to the dwarf planet Pluto.
In the Plutonian system, one of the great surprises for planetary scientists
was a Chandra Observatory's detection of X-rays from Pluto.
This is only one of several phenomena at the planet
that sometimes draw the analogy of Pluto to a comet.
In the Electric Universe Theory, as developed by physicist Wal Thornhill,
any body on a significantly elliptical orbit
can display comet-like characteristics.
Today, Eugene Bagashov offers his own thoughts on this
and other surprises from Pluto,
including the mysterious behavior of the Plutonian atmosphere.
Eugene Bagashov: In one of the previous Space News episodes on Pluto,
I've mentioned the various atmospheric anomalies
that have been detected at this dwarf planet by New Horizon spacecraft.
Those include, for example, the low atmospheric pressure
and at the same time the unexpectedly high location of haze layers.
And in the paper called "The Atmosphere of Pluto as Observed by New Horizons"
that came out in March of 2016,
there are reports of some new misconceptions being observed.
For example, it is said that the upper atmosphere,
approximately 200 kilometers and above,
is much colder and much more compact than the models indicate.
So, the authors have supposed there should be some "cooling agent" present there.
Yet, they acknowledge the complete lack of evidence for such a presence.
And it seems that the nitrogen escape into space
is also a few orders of magnitude less than was previously thought,
actually around 10,000-times less.
Such a huge mistake clearly means there is something wrong.
Basically, the model that is being used doesn't seem to work.
The temperature near the surface, on the other hand,
was determined to be somewhat higher than it should be, around 45 Kelvin.
The models seem to indicate that, at the given atmospheric pressure,
the nitrogen ice will be in equilibrium with the atmosphere only at around 37 Kelvin.
So, the atmosphere near the surface is 8 degrees too hot,
if one might use this word for Pluto conditions at all.
It's too hot for the nitrogen ice to just sit there.
So, the scientists have supposed that the surface might possibly be
covered with some other less volatile material.
Yet, as I've noted in previous parts of his review,
we clearly see nitrogen spectral signature on the surface.
The mentioned paper also reports of an identification of at least
20 haze layers in the Pluto's atmosphere,
separated by distances of the order of tens of kilometers.
The authors propose gravitational wave-like displacement
as the physical reason for the observed layering.
It is thought that the process might be initially driven by sublimation
and the interaction of weak Pluto winds
with the orographic features such as mountains.
The proposed wind speeds are around one or two meters per second.
But from the EU perspective, such layered structure
makes one think about plasma behavior,
which is not at all far-fetched,
given their apparent lack of any significant protection
from ionization by solar particles and galactic cosmic rays.
In my opinion, it is entirely possible that the electromagnetic effects
might be somehow ruining the models that are used by the New Horizons team
to infer the temperature, pressure, and other relevant parameters.
Another evidence for this comes from the recent paper quite straightforwardly titled
"The Puzzling Detection of X-rays from Pluto by Chandra."
Chandra is a well-known space X-ray observatory.
Once in 2014 and on three occasions in 2015,
it has been devoting its time to the Pluto observations
in support of the New Horizons mission.
As a result of approximately two days of total observation time,
it has detected eight photons in the energy range from 300 to 600 electron volts
while none has been detected in the range of 600 to 1000 electron volts.
The detected events seem to be genuine,
that is, not related to background sources or the instrument noise.
And they all come from the square box with the side of 100 Pluto radii
centered on the planet itself.
Unfortunately, the instrument resolution couldn't allow for any more details.
So, they have to originate from somewhere in the system.
And maybe eight photons in two days doesn't sound like much.
But considering how far away we are,
if the same flux is going in every direction,
we get a pretty impressive 200 megawatts of X-ray power flux leaving Pluto.
This is about it 1,000-times weaker than the total power of Earth auroras
during a decent geomagnetic storm.
The question, however, is where do these X-ray photons come from?
The authors of the paper rule out the possibility of auroras on Pluto
since it is supposed not to have any significant magnetic field.
Another possibility is scattering of solar X-rays
but the spectrum is different and the power is up to 1,000-times too high.
So, the last option that the authors propose
is the so-called "solar wind charge exchange."
Basically, this means that the solar wind ions strip away electrons
from the atmospheric atoms,
and those electrons settle in the solar wind atoms,
making the neutral or less ionized,
at the same time emitting a photon in this case in X-ray energy range.
Very roughly speaking, it is the transport of negative charge
from the atmosphere to the solar wind,
which sounds pretty much like an electric current.
Anyway, the interesting part is that this process
will be more or less consistent in terms of spectrum,
still is thought to be too weak to provide the needed number of events.
The author state that one needs around 40 times more solar wind hitting Pluto
than should be available at this distance from the Sun.
I quote: "The solar wind must be somehow significantly focused
and enhanced within 60,000 km of Pluto for this mechanism to work."
Do we know any means of focusing positively charged particles?
Well, the most simple and straightforward answer would be with the electric field.
If you suppose that Pluto bears the negative charge
with respect to the solar wind coming from the inner heliosphere,
it would indeed tend to focus it, almost like an electric lens, so to speak.
It might as well happened that the charge would be big enough
to accumulate the wind from a very big area.
Thus generating the needed number of events.
What is interesting is that the solar wind density,
registered by SWAP instrument at the time of the fly-by,
was actually around five-times bigger than expected.
It was thought to be a result of the recent passage of coronal mass ejection shockwave
but might at least partly be caused by the mentioned focusing of the solar wind.
One of the arguments against the electric comet idea, by the way,
is that the solar wind density is too low
to produce the observed amount of water in comets.
But very simple calculations show that it might be easily compensated
by taking into account the negative charge of comet nuclei,
which we know is present and the charge needed is very reasonable.
For example, for the maximum of [Comet] 67P water emissions,
my calculations gave the charge of the order of only tens of coulombs.
Of course, here I've neglected Debye screening and other complex plasma effects,
which might be very important but the core idea seems not at all impossible.
So, it seems the specific electromagnetic effects might be responsible
for the X-ray emissions on Pluto as well as the other mentioned anomalies.
I'd like to mention that the comparison of Pluto
with comets and 67P in particular is not too far-fetched.
The X-rays detected by the Chandra telescope
are in the energetic range of a few hundred electron volts,
which obviously would correspond to the electrons being accelerated
by the electric field of a few hundred volts potential difference,
somewhere in the Pluto environment.
And interestingly enough, the Rosetta probe,
upon the arrival in the vicinity of the Comet 67P,
have detected a mono-energetic beam of singly-negatively charged dust particles
with energy of a few hundred electron volts.
The fact that those particles had almost the same energy
means they also most likely were accelerated by the electric field,
and not were the result of some thermal processes or whatever.
So, it seems that in general this kind of electric potential scale,
a few hundred volts, might be characteristic of the interaction
of very small bodies with interplanetary plasma.
Another occasion of very similar negative beam detection
is the Saturn's moon Hyperion, zapping the Cassini probe during its flyby in 2005.
There the potential difference was of the same scale, around 200 volts.
Stay tuned for Part 4
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