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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: 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.