Scientists have always looked for water in places other than Earth, and for a long time,
they believed that Earth was the only place where it could be found.
But the universe never ceases to amaze us, and now scientists have discovered signs of
water in one of the universe's most unlikely locations.
Pluto, the former smallest planet in this solar system and now the largest dwarf planet,
is one of the weirdest yet most fascinating planets.
It has also been called a scientific wonderland by many.
Adding more to its wonders, the planet is showing signs of water.
Join us today to find out how it is possible for a planet to have water this far from its
star.
After Neptune was discovered in 1846, scientists began to notice many inconsistencies occurring
in the orbits of the gas giants.
So, they started their search for a ninth planet.
It was Percival Lowell, an American astronomer, who observed the pluto first.
He initially noticed signs of Pluto's existence in 1905, when he detected strange deviations
in the orbits of Neptune and Uranus.
He proposed that the gravity of another world was dragging on these two planets from beyond.
In 1915, Lowell predicted the location of the mysterious planet, but he died before
discovering it.
Pluto was finally discovered in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh at the Lowell Observatory, based
on predictions by Lowell and other astronomers.
Because Pluto is so far away from Earth, little was known about its size or surface conditions
until NASA's New Horizons mission.
NASA's New Horizons probe flew through the Pluto system for the first time on July 14,
2015, producing the first close-up photographs of Pluto and its moons as well as other data
that has revolutionized our knowledge of these fascinating worlds on the solar system's outskirts.
Pluto's surface is now coming into focus after 85 years of mystery, with a new NASA photo
displaying towering ice mountains rising from its unexpectedly youthful face.
At roughly minus 387 degrees Fahrenheit, Pluto is one of the coldest places in the solar
system.
It has a diameter of 1,473 miles.
That's less than one-fifth the diameter of Earth, and only about two-thirds as wide as
Earth's moon.
Pluto orbits the Sun about 3.6 billion miles (5.8 billion km) away on average, about 40
times as far as Earth.
A year on Pluto is 248 Earth years, and a day on Pluto lasts 153 hours, or about 6 Earth
days.
About Pluto, scientists have always had some questions.
Over the past few decades, astronomers began to inquire if Pluto was simply the first of
a group of small, frozen worlds beyond Neptune's orbit known as the Kuiper Belt.
The first habitat of this region, or Kuiper Belt Object KBO, was detected in 1992.
It was known as the 1992 QBI and was detected by David Jewitt and colleagues using the University
of Hawaii's 2.24m telescope at Mauna Kea.
The confirmation of the first KBO re-ignited the argument.
In addition, when the Hayden Planetarium in New York unveiled an exhibit with only eight
planets in 2000, it sparked outrage.
The discovery of Kuiper Belt Objects with masses similar to Pluto, however, pushed the
situation to a breaking point.
The other KBOs include Quaoar, announced in 2002; Sedna, a KBO that's about three-fourths
the size of Pluto that was discovered in 2004; and Eris, discovered in 2005 and is slightly
smaller than Pluto.
At first, Eris appeared to be larger than Pluto.
This sparked a controversy among scientists, culminating in the International Astronomical
Union's decision to clarify the definition of a planet in 2006.
According to this new definition, a planet must be large enough to clear its surroundings
of debris.
Pluto and Eris, surrounded by the Kuiper Belt, have clearly failed to do so.
And Pluto got kicked out of the nine planets' club and was categorized as a dwarf planet.
However, after the New Horizons mission, the dwarf planet again caught the attention of
scientists.
Very little was known about the dwarf planet's size or surface conditions until 2015.
Early images from New Horizons revealed Pluto's surface to be surprisingly young.
The surface features include mountains that reach as high as 11,000 feet (3,500 meters)
and are comparable to the Rocky Mountains on Earth.
Much of the surface is covered by methane and nitrogen ice.
The mission's observations of Pluto's surface revealed a number of surface features.
Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder,
Colorado, said, "It’s clear to me that the solar system saved the best for last!"
We could not have explored a more fascinating or scientifically important planet at the
edge of our solar system.
The New Horizons team worked for 15 years to plan and execute this flyby, and Pluto
paid us back in spades!
" One of the most intriguing and strange features
was a brilliant plain inside Pluto's distinctive heart-shaped feature, termed "Tombaugh Regio,"
after Pluto's discoverer.
The terrain is made up of a broken surface with irregularly shaped parts that appear
to be geologically young due to the lack of impact craters.
The left side of the region (an area that takes on the shape of an ice cream cone) is
covered in carbon monoxide ice.
Other differences in the composition of surface components have been discovered within Pluto's
"heart."
The New Horizons team has dubbed a smooth region in the center-left of Tombaugh Regio
"Sputnik Planum," after Earth's first artificial satellite, Sputnik.
This portion of Pluto's surface is devoid of craters generated by meteorite impacts,
implying that it is quite young geologically, a little more than 100 million years old.
It is thought to consist primarily of nitrogen ice, with smaller fractions of carbon monoxide
and methane ice, although relative proportions are uncertain.
The data from New Horizon revealed an active and complex surface geology, leading scientists
to believe a subsurface ocean exists beneath the thinned ice shell at Sputnik Planitia.
In recent years, those suspicions have morphed into presumptions.
Most planetary scientists now accept that Pluto possesses a worldwide liquid ocean beneath
its surface, even now.
But this is not just it.
These findings contradict the dwarf planet's age because the ocean should have frozen long
ago and the inner surface of the ice shell facing the ocean should have been flattened
as well.
Because at an average distance of 3.6 billion miles from the Sun, in the frigid reaches
of the Kuiper Belt, how can there still be liquid water?
According to a new study led by author Carver Bierson, a planetary scientist at the University
of California, Santa Cruz, instead of a cold formation, Pluto had a hot start, one full
of explosive force, and if Pluto formed quickly, the heat generated by this process could have
been sufficient to keep subsurface oceans liquid for billions of years.
Francis Nimmo, the study's author, said, "For a long time people have thought about the
thermal evolution of Pluto and the ability of an ocean to survive to the present day."
Now that we have images of Pluto's surface from NASA's New Horizons mission, we can compare
what we see with the predictions of different thermal evolution models.
" The researchers compared geological measurements
of Pluto taken by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft during its 2015 flyby of the dwarf planet
with several scenarios of Pluto's origin and evolution.
Pluto's frozen shell would have experienced compression early in the world's history as
heat from radioactive materials melted ice, and then extension later when these radioactive
elements broke down and Pluto cooled if Pluto had a cold start.
The most ancient regions of Pluto's surface photographed at high resolution, on the other
hand, show no evident signs of compression.
But instead, it showed ripples caused by expansion.
The researchers analyzed the ripples, or so-called "extensional features," on Pluto's surface.
What is the anomalous behavior of expansion on cooling and contraction on heating?
Water.
It expands as it freezes, so as Pluto's interior cooled, Pluto's surface stretched, generating
recognizable structures.
According to extensional features seen on its frozen surfaces, such as fissures in its
shell and an intriguing pattern of ridges and troughs, Pluto had a hot start.
According to the study's lead author, Bierson, "I think the most exciting implication is
that subsurface oceans may have been common among the large Kuiper Belt objects when they
formed."
The result shows that Pluto and other big dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt, such as
Eris, Makemake, and Haumea, may have had subterranean oceans since their formation.
According to the researchers, this could have altered the habitability of these distant
cold worlds.
Pluto, according to New Horizons, is a complicated small world with broad, smooth icy plains
of frozen nitrogen split into terrains and mountains made of water ice with methane "snow"
on top.
Pluto also has a very thin atmosphere of nitrogen, methane, and carbon monoxide, which glows
faintly as a blue ring around the dwarf planet when viewed backlit by the Sun by New Horizons.
Pluto has five moons, despite the fact that it is much smaller than Earth.
If there is an ocean below, this already weird environment will become increasingly stranger.
What do you think about the ocean hidden in Pluti?
Share your views with us in the comments section below.