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posted by CoolHand on Monday September 26 2016, @04:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the this-is-about-the-80's-band-right? dept.

A giant asteroid impact in the dwarf planet's past offers new insights into the possibility of an ocean beneath its surface.

Ever since NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto last year, evidence has been mounting that the dwarf planet may have a liquid ocean beneath its icy shell. Now, by modeling the impact dynamics that created a massive crater on Pluto's surface, a team of researchers has made a new estimate of how thick that liquid layer might be.

The study, led by Brown University geologist Brandon Johnson and published in Geophysical Research Letters, finds a high likelihood that there's more than 100 kilometers of liquid water beneath Pluto's surface. The research also offers a clue about the composition of that ocean, suggesting that it likely has a salt content similar to that of the Dead Sea.

Europa, Mars, Enceladus, Titan, and now...Pluto? Scientists who search for extra-terrestrial life focus on the presence of liquid water (or hydrocarbons, in the case of Titan), so the list of potential sites in the solar system is growing.


Original Submission

Related Stories

A "Hot Start" for Pluto May Have Allowed Early Formation of an Ocean 12 comments

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


Original Submission

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Arik on Monday September 26 2016, @05:11PM

    by Arik (4543) on Monday September 26 2016, @05:11PM (#406699) Journal
    This would be a pretty enormous potential source of water. Since Plutos gravity well is (much!) smaller than Earths the cost of taking off with it would be relatively low. But I have a feeling the cost of actually extracting it in the first place will still be prohibitively high for some time. The surface of Pluto is not exactly an environment favorable to our type of life, now imagine trying to run essentially a mining operation on it. I'm guessing you need to drill down quite a ways through some problematic materials to get to this liquid water, and I would guess it's only liquid because it exists at extreme pressure.
    --
    If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 26 2016, @06:58PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 26 2016, @06:58PM (#406718)

      It would be worth it, for the CEO giving the keynote address to take a sip from water brought back from Pluto.

      • (Score: 3, Funny) by aristarchus on Monday September 26 2016, @08:51PM

        by aristarchus (2645) on Monday September 26 2016, @08:51PM (#406742) Journal

        Fools! Seduced by a promiscuous gravity well? Fixated on "liquid" water? Do you not realize that if you start mining water from a dwarf planet like Pluto, it will become less massive? If that happens, its orbit will shift further away from Sol, perhaps causing a perturbation in the orbit of Planet X, or Nibiru, that would send it careening into the central solar system where undoubtedly it would of course collide with Earth. All this, for cheap water? What are you, Ice Pirates? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087451/ [imdb.com]

        • (Score: 2) by turgid on Tuesday September 27 2016, @07:48AM

          by turgid (4318) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday September 27 2016, @07:48AM (#406872) Journal

          In Scotland they have eschewed fracking and are building tidal power schemes. It's a Communist plot to drop the Moon on the Land of the Free.

          • (Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Wednesday September 28 2016, @06:46AM

            by aristarchus (2645) on Wednesday September 28 2016, @06:46AM (#407246) Journal

            Ah, the Scots!

            In Scotland they have eschewed fracking and are building tidal power schemes. It's a Communist plot to drop the Moon

            So, the Moon causes tides, and thus if we take energy from the tides, we are depleting the Moon? Am I reading this right? So once we harness enough tidal energy, the Moon will have to fall from the sky. Still a little unclear on the targeting procedures, though.

            But was not this part of my original objection? Liquid water, on Pluto? HOW? Has got to be tidal interaction with Charon, the ferryman to the afterlife (water, you see?) generating sufficient heat. So if we remove enough water to affect that tidal inter-relation, Charon will fall into Pluto, causing Pluto to leave its orbit, perturbing the orbit of the aforementioned Nemesis Planet of Earth, and we all die. Different mechanism, same result. Why not a nice water-mining trip to Europa this summer?

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 26 2016, @06:46PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 26 2016, @06:46PM (#406714)

    Too bad the probe was only able to get details of essentially roughly 40% of Pluto. The other side is mostly a blur. Who knows what other interesting features we missed.

    Pluto rotates about once every six days, and the probe was traveling so fast that it was too far away when the other side was visible.

    It took the probe about 10 years to get to Pluto, even though it's one of the fastest probes ever launched (assisted in speed by a Jupiter flyby). If we want to see more sides of Pluto, we either have to send a much slower probe, say one that takes 30 years to get there, or send an orbiter, which would probably also have to be relatively slow, otherwise it would be too hard/expensive to enter orbit, since you have to roughly match the velocity of the planet to enter orbit. (Or maybe use Uranus or Neptune as a "gravity break", but they'd have to be in the right place.)

    Maybe send quick "mini-probes" that only do one or two jobs, such as imaging. However, you still need a big antenna and fairly hefty power source to send all that data back from that distance such that there's going to be communication "overhead" no matter what. Thus, you might as well pay a little more and pack in other instruments.

    Perhaps clone New Horizons and send it to visit the other half. Using the same design should save money.

  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday September 26 2016, @08:45PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Monday September 26 2016, @08:45PM (#406741)

    > Scientists who search for extra-terrestrial life focus on the presence of liquid water

    I'm pretty sure that there are lots of lifeforms out in the universe who either have no clue about that weird H2O thing, or might even be harmed by it.
    There couldn't possibly be life at the bottom of the ocean, because there's no light nor air...

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 27 2016, @06:31AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 27 2016, @06:31AM (#406862)

      There is water at the bottom of the ocean.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 27 2016, @09:36AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 27 2016, @09:36AM (#406889)

        "Water running under. Under rocks and stones. Water running under." Talking Heads? "Once in a Lifetime"? Is this my beautiful house?