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posted by martyb on Wednesday June 24 2020, @09:26PM   Printer-friendly
from the Mickey-Mouse-conclusion? dept.

Evidence supports 'hot start' scenario and early ocean formation on Pluto (SD)

The accretion of new material during Pluto's formation may have generated enough heat to create a liquid ocean that has persisted beneath an icy crust to the present day, despite the dwarf planet's orbit far from the sun in the cold outer reaches of the solar system.

This "hot start" scenario, presented in a paper published June 22 in Nature Geoscience [DOI: 10.1038/s41561-020-0595-0] [DX], contrasts with the traditional view of Pluto's origins as a ball of frozen ice and rock in which radioactive decay could have eventually generated enough heat to melt the ice and form a subsurface ocean.

[...] The researchers calculated that if Pluto formed over a period of less that 30,000 years, then it would have started out hot. If, instead, accretion took place over a few million years, a hot start would only be possible if large impactors buried their energy deep beneath the surface.

The new findings imply that other large Kuiper belt objects probably also started out hot and could have had early oceans. These oceans could persist to the present day in the largest objects, such as the dwarf planets Eris and Makemake.

Previously:
Pluto's 'Heart' Sheds Light On Possible Buried Ocean
Subsurface Ocean Could Explain Pluto's "Heart" Feature Aligning with Charon
Pluto Has an Underground Ocean Kept Warm by a Layer of Gassy Ice


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @12:55AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @12:55AM (#1012229)

    I'd guess that being anti-vax correlates well with
    a. Parents of children who have some condition which someone claimed could be caused by vaccines
    b. Nutjobs
    No reason to look for a partisan bent, denial and crazy exist everywhere.

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