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Pluto May be Made of a Billion Comets

posted by martyb on Friday May 25 2018, @01:38PM   Printer-friendly
from the Gee-Mickey...-is-THAT-what-I'm-made-of? dept.

takyon writes:

Pluto May Not Be a Planet, But It Could Be Made Out of Millions of Comets

Pluto may not be categorised as a planet any more, but it still holds plenty of fascination. For instance, how did the dwarf planet form, and why is it so different from the planets? By examining its chemical composition, researchers have come up with a new idea: Pluto is made of comets.

According to the currently accepted model, planets are formed by the gradual accretion of smaller objects - and Pluto, situated right next to the Kuiper Belt asteroid field, has long been thought to have formed the same way. So that part is nothing new.

But there are similarities between Pluto and Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko that scientists from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) believe may not be coincidental. In particular, the nitrogen-rich ice in Pluto's Sputnik Planitia.

[...] "We found an intriguing consistency between the estimated amount of nitrogen inside the glacier and the amount that would be expected if Pluto was formed by the agglomeration of roughly a billion comets or other Kuiper Belt objects similar in chemical composition to 67P, the comet explored by Rosetta."

Also at SwRI.

Primordial N2 provides a cosmochemical explanation for the existence of Sputnik Planitia, Pluto (DOI unknown, Journal Icarus) (arXiv)

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday May 25 2018, @06:26PM (11 children)

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Friday May 25 2018, @06:26PM (#684128) Journal

    Sympathetic to contrarian bullshit, what a surprise.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 25 2018, @06:38PM (9 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 25 2018, @06:38PM (#684134)

    Well, I came across the comet issues during the Rosetta mission. They constructed the Philae lander with "ice screws" based on the assumption the surface would have the consistency of ice, it didn't:

    There were three methods to secure it after landing: ice screws, harpoons and a small thruster. The ice screws were designed with relatively soft material in mind, but Agilkia turned out to be very hard and they did not penetrate the surface.

    http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2015/11/12/rosetta-and-philae-one-year-since-landing-on-a-comet/ [esa.int]

    So when actually trying to apply conclusions drawn from the comet theory to the real world it failed epically. I'm sure now they are saying something like "our theory also allows for non-icy surfaces". However, just that they made engineering decisions based on it tells you the "icy surface" idea was no minor thing. I'm sure the engineers involved are pissed at the scientists about this.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 25 2018, @07:00PM (8 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 25 2018, @07:00PM (#684147)

      From the "Thunderbolts Project" [youtube.com].

      On that channel, there are numerous other such videos about comets, which I highly recommend, if only for entertainment. Come on! Don't be afraid to try on new ideas.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 25 2018, @07:55PM (7 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 25 2018, @07:55PM (#684174)

        I'm not really interested in trying to learn from youtube videos. More like:

        At the site of the last touchdown of Philae on the nucleus, there was an attempt to intrude the MUPUS probe into the surface material. No noticeable intrusion was achieved, leading to an estimate for the minimum compressive strength of the material at ≥4 MPa. This is a fairly high strength, at least an order of magnitude greater than the typical value for snow (Fig. 6). Apparently, this is evidence of the presence at this site of highly porous ice with grains “frozen” at contacts, which may be due to the fact that this place is very poorly illuminated by the Sun and ice here may formed as a result of bringing into this dark and, therefore, very cold place the products of sublimation of volatile components from sunlit areas.

        https://link.springer.com/article/10.1134%2FS0038094616040018 [springer.com]

        So they've come up with a save. They landed in an exceptional spot on the comet... Lets see what was predicted beforehand by the comet theory:

        When designing Philae, engineering models for the comet surface properties covered a range for the compressive strength between 60 kPa and 2 MPa [7].

        https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0027/17d6faf2eabd8f20c39ba824f1fd95ba9640.pdf [semanticscholar.org]

        compressive strength is about one order of magnitude higher than tensile strength
        [...]
        From the discussion above the conclusion can be drawn that the cometary surface on meter scales has a reason able lower limit of the tensile strength of the order of 1 kPa whereas the probable upper limit can be taken as 100 kPa. The lower limit of tensile strength corresponds to a compressive strength of > 7 kPa.

        https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094576509001684 [sciencedirect.com]

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 25 2018, @08:13PM (6 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 25 2018, @08:13PM (#684187)

          Whatevs, bro.

          I guess you never visit Wikipedia, either.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 25 2018, @08:32PM (4 children)

            by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 25 2018, @08:32PM (#684195)

            I visit wikipedia all the time. I also watch "educational" stuff on youtube all the time, usually to go to sleep (yes I have watched electric universe stuff for that purpose). The bandwidth of video and lectures is just too slow for me, I need to be able to skip around and get the details I care about in the order I want.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 25 2018, @08:54PM (3 children)

              by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 25 2018, @08:54PM (#684207)

              Next time, just say "Also, here is some textual information with citations."

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 25 2018, @09:05PM (2 children)

                by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 25 2018, @09:05PM (#684214)

                Nope. I really did want you to know that some people do not like learning from youtube videos. So if you can put the information in a more suitable format it would be much more likely to spread.

                • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 25 2018, @10:21PM (1 child)

                  by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 25 2018, @10:21PM (#684243)

                  It's shockingly terrible.

                  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 25 2018, @11:18PM

                    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 25 2018, @11:18PM (#684261)

                    I took this advice last year and it fucked me up. Ill never do that again.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 26 2018, @12:09PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 26 2018, @12:09PM (#684485)

            YouTube is a horrible abomination. Educational material should be delivered in textual form, not buring behind 10 minutes of hemming and hawing and taking gross amounts of bandwidth for the information presented. I hate video for all purposes except porn and funny shit. Fuck your YouTube links, give me good clean text.

  • (Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 25 2018, @06:45PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 25 2018, @06:45PM (#684139)

    A "contrarian" is someone who takes the opposing side in a debate because he thinks it's fun.

    However, fringe theorists are not necessarily contrarians; they are pursuing objective reality by not only theorizing, but also by experimenting—if their ideas are wrong, they abandon those ideas, rather than say "Well, I guess it's dark matter!".

    Now compare these 2 points of view:

    • The large scale universe is governed solely by the weakest force, gravity.

    • The large scale universe is also shaped by one of the strongest forces, electromagnetism.

    Guess what, the Universe is filled with plasma, and electromagnetic phenomena are known in the maintream to scale from the very small to the very large (no upper limit, so far). So, stick with just your gravity, and try to explain everything with collisions and accretion and "dark matter" (i.e., the epicycles of Mars), or try theorizing and experimenting with more phenomena in your chest of tools.