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Pluto New Horizons |OT| New images. Pluto/Charon still geologically active

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F

fallout

Member
This stuff is so exciting to me. So many of the places we've visited in my lifetime already had existing data sets which were just being added to. Almost all of this is new and groundbreaking.
 
U

User 73706

Banned
GK86 said:
Good to see that comments like these pop up no matter what type of conference is happening lol.
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*NASA finds a Monolith on the dark side of the moon*

"does it even do anything? i have one of those at home, it's called a refrigerator. get to the space lasers and stuff"
 
F

Fenderputty

Banned
I mean these guys spend a lifetime studying and preparing for a mission like this. They're obviously going to react different than internet nerds.

I'm still pretty blown away.
 
J

jett

D-Member
where the talking cockroaches at

I guess this is the exciting information... Which is neat and all, but yeah...
 
C

cameron

Member
NASA’s New Horizons Discovers Frozen Plains in the Heart of Pluto’s ‘Heart’
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dACIJJ0.jpg
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.
 
F

fallout

Member
frey said:
Where's this picture that will make me faint ?
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It's a picture that would make an astrogeologist faint (who had been waiting for this data for 10+ years without any knowledge of what to expect). People dedicate their lives to this work and this is some fantastic data. Pluto could have been a dead, crater pocketed rock. Instead, it turns out to be really interesting. That's super exciting to the scientific community.
 
K

KarmaCow

Member
If anyone is expecting anything paradigm breaking in terms of aliens might as well tune out now.

These are people who have made it their careers and devoted more than a decade to this mission. No shit they are going to be more invested in this than your average person with no background in astronomy.
 
M

Mindlog

Member
Pretty spectacular how quickly our understanding of a body can come into clarity. The mission itself take a long time of course, but all of a sudden... results!

Very happy for the NH team.
 
J

jett

D-Member
Seems no active geology, for the time being. Dwarf planet status reconfirmed.

KarmaCow said:
If anyone is expecting anything paradigm breaking in terms of aliens might as well tune out now.

These are people who have made it their careers and devoted more than a decade to this mission. No shit they are going to be more invested in this than your average person with no background in astronomy.
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I think most of us are just having a laugh. :p
 
F

Fine Ham Abounds

Member
I mean, you're either gonna nerd out over this because of the reality of everything, the variety of the geology, the fact that no one yet has a clue how anything we're seeing exists or even exactly what it is yet

or you're not gonna be impressed by anything but alien ruins
 
G

GK86

Homeland Security Fail
Let's me real though: the graphics aren't even good.



I'm impressed with the 10 year old camera tech.
 
F

fallout

Member
jett said:
I think most of us are just having a laugh. :p
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Ha, I think that's totally fair. I've known a lot of scientists in my life and many of them become rather obsessed with their incredibly specific work. It goes along with the job (particularly when you're fighting for funding), but you have to learn to keep your expectations in check when you're listening to them talk about how amazing their discoveries are.
 
Stiflers Mom

Stiflers Mom

Banned
Fine Ham Abounds said:
I mean, you're either gonna nerd out over this because of the reality of everything, the variety of the geology, the fact that no one yet has a clue how anything we're seeing exists or even exactly what it is yet

or you're not gonna be impressed by anything but alien ruins
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Us, as non-scientists, relate more to the "emotional aspects" of this.

I think, flying by and then Pluto displaying an area that looks like a heart meant more to the general public than if there is some ice or not melting away there.

These things are so unrelatable to an everyday person, it's hard to understand why somebody would faint over looking at some ice fields...
 
F

Fenderputty

Banned
StifflersMum said:
Us, as non-scientists, relate more to the "emotional aspects" of this.

I think, flying by and then Pluto displaying an area that looks like a heart meant more to the general public than if there is some ice or not melting away there.

These things are so unrelatable to an everyday person, it's hard to understand why somebody would faint over looking at some ice fields...
Click to expand...

To be fair, the average everyday person isn't watching this stream.
 
S

Staab

Member
Science never sleeps, boys !

Interesting stuff there, not quite as mindblowing (for us) as we thought but there's some weird terrain going on ..
 
C

cameron

Member
spekkeh said:
I missed the press conference. Those ridges look like they're carved out by liquids. But apparently that's not (necessarily) the case?
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They're not sure. They said it might be due to thermal contraction, like the polar regions on Mars, or by convection.
Moore says that one of the few terrains that invites a confident diagnosis are the pitted regions, which form as ice sublimates into the atmosphere. He cannot say whether the hills are features that were pushed up above the surrounding plains, or whether they are composed of tougher materials that resisted erosion as the rest of the region wore down. “They can either be popping up or emerging from an erosion-lowering process,” he says. The polygonal troughs are also mysterious, he says. He doesn’t know whether they result from convection in the interior—the large-scale patterns of heat upwelling in Pluto’s mantle—or from contracting ice, analogously to the way mud cracks form on Earth.
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Other bits:
Most tantalizing of all, the team has spotted streaks of material that may have blown downwind from dark spots. Although the team is not yet ready to declare that these spots are geysers shooting plumes above Pluto, scientists say the spots and streaks resemble actively spewing geysers on Neptune’s moon Triton that were discovered in 1989.

The evidence is accumulating that Pluto is an active world, and not only as a place shaped by top-down atmospheric processes of frost and wind and sublimating ice. There also appear to be processes working from the bottom up: forces that lift up water ice mountains the size of the Rocky Mountains and allow them to sit next to smooth plains of ice that, the team suspects, have been resurfaced as recently as within the past 100 million years—or even last week.
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Moore says it’s likely that the Sputnik Planum terrain—which also contains the geyserlike spots—extends all the way up into the left ventricle of the heart. Stern presented chemical evidence that this entire region is enriched in carbon monoxide ice. It could be either a pool of very thick layers of ice that welled up from below, or just a centimeter-thick veneer of carbon monoxide snow from above. Moore says the jury is still out on whether Tombaugh Regio was emplaced from below or shaped from above. Quite possibly, he says, both processes are in play: The terrain may have been deposited in a bout of activity a long time ago, and since been eroded. “It could be there’s a source region there,” Stern says. “It’s a very special place on the planet.”
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http://news.sciencemag.org/space/2015/07/potential-geysers-spotted-pluto

Conference uploaded on NASA youtube (audio more or less in sync): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAGwxl7FZWw
 
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