I must not have been paying attention back in July 2015, when NASA’s ‘New Horizons’ spacecraft flew past the planet Pluto and began streaming photographs back to earth. Very likely, I was busy reading infuriating messages posted by my left-wing and right-wing friends on Facebook. It’s hard to pay attention to the universe, when you have radical friends.
Luckily, some scientists were hired to study the photos and data from 2015, and this past Tuesday, they published a report that mentioned the “icy mountains of Pluto.” A bunch of media outlets jumped on the story, and I would bet money that someone (who is non-political) probably posted a link on Facebook as well. (But I wouldn’t know about that, because I’ve stopped using Facebook. Time to put the election behind us, and focus on what’s truly important.)
The 12-year-long New Horizons mission wasn’t cheap — about $780 million. But it got some great photos of a place none of us are likely to visit… given that Pluto is 4 billion miles from Earth. (That’s billion, with a b, in case you were wondering.)
Here’s a link to the Tuesday, October 13 article on Nature.com:
“Within the dark equatorial region of Cthulhu, bright frost containing methane is observed coating crater rims and walls, as well as mountain tops, providing spectacular resemblance to terrestrial snow-capped mountain chains. However, the origin of these deposits remained enigmatic…”
The scientists were not happy with enigmatic snow, however. (Who is?) So they’ve apparently been spending the past five years arguing about how this ‘bright frost containing methane” happened to be covering the icy peaks of Pluto. (Methane, CH4, is an invisible gas that leaks out of abandoned oil wells. How exactly it came to be on Pluto, the report doesn’t say. I guess the scientists don’t know all the answers.)
The questions about how the methane came to cover the icy mountain of Pluto have nothing to do with temperature. The estimated temperature on the surface of Pluto is plenty cold enough for snow and ice to form.
“Our model indicates that despite their very low albedo (∼0.1), the equatorial regions in Cthulhu in 2014–2015 are cold enough during night-time (~40–42 K) to trigger CH4 condensation onto the surface and the formation of μm-thin CH4 frosts…”
Which is to say, the nighttime temperatures on Pluto (in 2014-2015) were in the range of 40-42 degrees Kelvin. That’s like, 40 degrees above ‘absolute zero’. (Nothing can be colder than absolute zero, they tell me.) Cold enough for snow, in other words. The report said nothing about the daytime temperatures. I assume they were in the same general range?
At any rate, it appears Pluto has year-round snow, which should make some skiers happy. But you would have to bundle up.
Which brings me to Pagosa Springs. I’m pretty sure that the San Juan Mountains are getting cold enough for snow, because I have to put on a jacket when I walk the dog in the morning. And I can see my breath. But no snow yet. Things are looking pretty darn dry up there. Nothing much yet for scientists to measure, or study.
But I have faith that we will soon have snow on the mountains. Really soon. And for a lot less than $780 million, those same scientists can come and take pictures, and argue about where the snow came from. (I can tell them. It came out of the clouds.)
Incidentally, the New Horizons spacecraft was unmanned. But you knew that.