New Horizons Update: The Slushy Ocean Beneath Pluto, Viscous Water World Gives Clues To Vastness of the Universe
Beyond the outer Solar system rests the dwarf planet Pluto, discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930 and was considered the second-most-massive known dwarf planet in the Solar System. It is also the ninth-largest and tenth-most-massive known object directly orbiting 3.67 billion miles from the Sun.
Studying the dwarf planet since the 1980s, Richard Binzel, an MIT professor said that Pluto triumphantly gives humans surprises but this one knocked our socks off. The Scientific Journal Nature published reports about Pluto's geological diversity. Scientists found that it has rivers and lakes of liquid nitrogen.
The University of Arizona suggested that Sputnik Planitia altered tidal forces between Pluto and its satellite, Charon and filled with water-ice, as the first study. Then, the partially-frozen underground ocean was discovered in the second study where the reorientation was caused by tidal forces as a result of a "slushy," and the ice that accounts for the mass that tilted the dwarf planet over is not liquid water.
The basin, which is covered deeply in nitrogen, is informally named as Sputnik Planitia. This region is permanently tidally locked in with its satellite Charon.
Sputnik Planitia is the western lobe of the "Heart", a 1000 km-wide basin of frozen carbon monoxide and nitrogen. It is divided into polygonal cells which simply carrying floating blocks of sublimation pits and water ice crust towards their margins.
When an asteroid slammed into Pluto's surface billions of years ago, it sits an angle of 120 degrees and tilts back and forth by about 20 degrees over the last 10 million years, leaving behind a crater that filled up with nitrogen ice. The recent study helps to explain features that look very much like stream beds and frozen lakes. Pluto astonishes humans with new discoveries that help create wonder that the universe has a lot to offer.
