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Astronomers using the «James Webb» telescope were able to find out the secret of climate formation on tiny Pluto.
After NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto in 2015, astronomers’ idea of what it tiny planet, covered with an eternal layer of ice has changed. It turned out that Pluto has icy plains and mountains. The biggest surprise, however, was the multi-layered haze in the planet’s atmosphere, which stretches for 300 km. It was much more complex and located much higher in the atmosphere than scientists had expected.
New observational data from the «James Webb» spacecraft have confirmed that this unusual haze controls the climate on Pluto. It turned out that this haze, which consists of organic particles hydrocarbon and nitrile ice, controls up to 80% of the planet’s heat balance. This is what Pluto does the only known object the solar system, where haze, not gas molecules, plays a key role in climate.
Back in 2017, astronomer Xi Zhang from the University of California predicted that the complex organic particles contained in this fog absorb sunlight and return it to space in the form of infrared radiation, which allows for effective cooling of the atmosphere. This provides an answer to the question of why the upper layer of Pluto’s atmosphere has a temperature of -203 C°, below which is 30° lower than previously thought.
For many years, astronomers have been unable to confirm this hypothesis because Pluto’s moon Charon orbits so close to the tiny planet that signals from them were difficult to distinguish. These results also suggest that a similar haze-driven climate may exist on other nebulous objects, such as Neptune’s moon Triton or Saturn’s moon Titan.
Confirmation that it is the haze that controls the climate on Pluto also explains the seasonal migration of ice, when nitrogen and methane deposits move between the poles and the equator, and some of them are carried by the solar wind to Charon. Organic particles similar to those previously found on Titan were found in the haze According to the study, Charon is dominated by water ice, and its polar regions have an abnormally low emissivity.
«This discovery links Pluto to the early Earth, which was dominated by nitrogen and hydrocarbons. Similar processes could have influenced the climate of our planet billions of years ago», — Xi Zhang notes.
The results of the study are published in the journal Nature Astronomy
Source: LiveScience