Pluto May Have Begun Its Life As Hothead, NASA Says
PLUTO – The dwarf planet Pluto might have start its life a a hothead that shelters a subsurface ocean, researchers said.
This was based on an image analysis on the dwarf planet’s surfaces, which was taken in 2015 by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, according to Reuters.
Computer simulations of Pluto have led them to from a “hot start” scenario for its formation at about 4.5 billion years ago as the solar system took form.
“When Pluto was forming, new material would have been coming in and impacting its surface. Each impact is like an explosion that would warm the nearby area,”
This was a statement from Carver Bierson, a planetary scientist from the University of California Santa Cruz and the lead author of the research that was published in the journal Nature Geoscience.
“If Pluto formed slowly, the surface would cool between each impact and generally stay very cold. If Pluto formed quickly, you have impact on top of impact and the surface doesn’t have time to cool. We calculate that if Pluto formed in less than 30,000 years, the heat from these impacts could have been sufficient to lead to an early ocean,”
Based on the report, Bierson said that the aforementioned dwarf planet that was orbiting the sun in a region called the Kuiper Belt, might have an icy outer shell hundreds of miles thick above an ocean of water that might be mixed with salts and ammonia and a solid rocky core below.
Under this situation, parts of the ocean would eventually freeze over time. Water expands as it freezes. The cracks on Pluto’s surfacing might be the proof of that.
Bierson said that a subsurface ocean could make the dwarf planet a candidate for harboring living organisms since water is considered a vital ingredient for life.
“Water could have been interacting chemically with the rocky core beneath the ocean, giving you more chemical ingredients to work with,”
“Are those the right ingredients for life? We don’t know. We need to learn more about how life forms, or how life could form, to find these answers.”
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