Welcome to Space News from the Electric Universe
brought to you by The Thunderbolts Project™
at Thunderbolts.info
Today, physicist Eugene Bagashov concludes his presentation
on the findings to date of NASA's New Horizons mission to the dwarf planet Pluto.
In this fourth and final episode,
Eugene shifts his focus to the Plutonian system's mysterious moons.
The surprisingly chaotic system has been characterized as "pandemonium"
and the moons themselves present many puzzles for planetary scientists.
Do these surprises lend further support to the Electric Universe concepts
about the origins of Pluto and its moons?
Now let's turn our attention to the moons of Pluto.
We've already briefly touched on the topic of Charon's surface composition
but there's more to it.
It's quite obvious, at least looking at the pictures
with enhanced coloration that we have in our possession,
that Charon has quite a distinct northern polar area
seemingly redder and darker than the other regions
which are mostly gray and pretty uniform.
So this reddish hue is also thought to come from some organic materials.
I recall that in the very first Space News episode on New Horizons flyby of Pluto
called "Pluto New Horizons in The Electric Universe,"
I stated that it is possible that we might observe some signs of the atmospheric exchange
between those major bodies and maybe the smaller satellites too.
So a few weeks ago, there appeared a new paper called
"The formation of Charon's red poles from seasonally cold-trapped volatiles."
In this paper, the authors put forth a hypothesis
that the source for the material coloring the poles of Charon is Pluto's atmosphere.
By the way, the plural in the title is also justified.
There have been observations made by New Horizons probe
of the other hemisphere of Charon,
illuminated by the very faint light reflected from Pluto, so called "Pluto shine."
Of course, the resolution of such imagery is very bad
but it's still allowed the scientists to detect a similar red patch
on the southern pole of the Pluto's biggest moon.
So as it is quite clear from the title, the red material on Charon's poles
is supposed to be a seasonally determined phenomena.
According to the paper, methane and possibly some other gases
are thought to escape Pluto and end up on Charon.
But that is not enough to produce this coloration.
Those materials should first settle on the surface during the so-called "cold trapping,"
which they might do only when it is too cold and no sunlight,
which in turn is why they tend to be located in the polar areas.
And then they are bombarded by external radiation,
mostly thought to be scattered solar UV rays,
and in the process are transformed into more complex and less volatile materials,
the proverbial Tholins for example.
Then, as the sunlight returns to those regions,
the bigger and more complex molecules are too heavy
to easily sublimate and leave the surface so they stick there for centuries,
slowly and thoroughly accumulating.
So that is the story.
I think it is worth noting that the red coloration
doesn't change the spectrum of Charon poles too much.
It's just adding a little bit to the continuum absorption in the shorter wavelengths
relative to the spectra of lower latitudes areas.
In my opinion, it sounds more or less plausible
but I want to once again highlight the fact that Tholins,
as has been shown experimentally,
might be produced with electric discharges and so these polar caps of Charon,
as well as the equatorial belt of Pluto, might also have rather electric origins.
Maybe there is some sort of constant connection,
possibly even a straight forward current running between those bodies,
like the one between Io and Jupiter for example.
Or, both of those features might have been produced at once
in some cataclysmic event in the past.
Pluto has its belt interrupted by the bright Tombaugh Regio
and on the Charon we see similar interruption
by a big crater to the lower right of the pole
which might mean that the crater appeared after
the coloration had already been present.
Another paper about Pluto's moons reveals an interesting detail.
All of them spin pretty quickly and chaotically.
There's an animation made by NASA
which is supposed to give you a rough idea of what I mean by that.
And at first it might seem more or less reasonable.
Pluto-Charon system is a complex binary dwarf planet,
the only one known in the solar system, at least so far.
So its gravitational field is pretty far
from one with trivial roughly spherical symmetry.
But still, the outer moonlets orbit far enough
for the field of Pluto and Charon dragging them roughly in the same direction.
And even for spherical object the gravitational field is not homogenous
but it is stronger at the closest side of the orbiting body and weakest on the farthest.
This produces the tidal forces
which tend to elongate the objects along the axis directed to the parent body.
This tendency also damps the rotation of the orbiting body, if there was any,
eventually producing the tidally locked systems, just like the Pluto-Charon system is,
where both bodies are tidally locked to each other due to this mutual influence.
For example, if you placed the elongated rod in low-earth orbit,
it would tend to orient itself pointing to the center of the Earth
because of those tidal forces.
And as the mentioned paper shows, the smaller Pluto's moons
Nix, Hydra, Styx and Kerberos are not spherical but quite prolonged
with the ratio of maximum to minimum size of about 2.
So, for them, this tidal effect should be quite noticeable,
and over time it should have slowed down their rotation.
But it hasn't, which means that those objects are probably fairly young,
and it is another argument against the nebular hypothesis of their formation.
Much more likely they are the result of some cataclysmic event,
possibly involving both Pluto and Charon, that way or another.
In my opinion, this is another good point in favor of the hypothesis
that Pluto wasn't actually formed where we see it today
but ended up there during some epic of planetary instability and chaos.
To conclude this overview, I'd like to say that we're still really,
really far away from figuring what's going on in the Pluto system
and for that matter on other planets, including our own.
The Thunderbolts Project as well as the whole Electric Universe community, in my opinion,
does a great job of providing alternative insight into the data being reported
on the state of things in our cosmic neighborhood.
I think the more we're going to learn,
the more we would appreciate the role of electromagnetism
and maybe even other still unknown forces, in organizing the matter around us,
as well as the processes within our very selves.
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