Skip to main content
Pluto is emitting X-rays, and it's challenging our understanding of the Solar System

This is so strange.
Astronomers working with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have witnessed everyone’s favourite dwarf planet, Pluto, emitting X-rays, and it's the first time an object in the Kuiper Belt has been found to do so.
This strange discovery could help researchers understand more about Pluto’s atmosphere, as well as the atmospheres of other objects at the very edges of our Solar System.
"We've just detected, for the first time, X-rays coming from an object in our Kuiper Belt, and learned that Pluto is interacting with the solar wind in an unexpected and energetic fashion," said team leader Carey Lisse, from Johns Hopkins University.
"We can expect other large Kuiper Belt objects to be doing the same.
The team was made aware of the X-ray emissions during the New Horizons mission in 2015.
As the craft headed out to the distant planet, which lies at its furthest point 7.5 billion kilometres (4.67 billion miles) away from Earth, Chandra astronomers observed Pluto on four separate occasions, finding evidence of an X-ray glow each time.
This is a surprising discovery, because unlike Earth and other celestial bodies in our Solar System, Pluto lacks a magnetic field, and is extremely far away from the Sun - two factors that strongly suggest that X-ray emission is impossible.
"Before our observations, scientists thought it was highly unlikely that we'd detect X-rays from Pluto, causing a strong debate as to whether Chandra should observe it at all," said team member Scott Wolk, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics.
"Prior to Pluto, the most distant Solar System body with detected X-ray emission was Saturn’s rings and disk."
Despite the doubts, Lisse knew from previous research that the gas surrounding planetary bodies can interact with charged solar wind particles to create X-rays - an hypothesis that is now backed up by the Chandra observations.
But the weird thing is that Pluto is emitting far more X-rays than a body with only gas surrounding it should, at such a vast distance from the Sun.
While there's still a lot to figure out here, the team says that the emissions might be caused by interplanetary magnetic fields pushing more solar particles toward Pluto, causing more emissions that they would typically think.
Or it could be that there's a longer trail of gases lingering behind the dwarf planet that might have been missed by New Horizons.
Further research will hopefully help us to figure out what's behind Pluto's rather bright X-ray glow, and given that the findings suggest that other Kuiper Belt objects might also emit X-rays, astronomers will probably be looking for proof of that, too.
The team’s work was published in Icarus.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

This strange mineral grows on dead bodies and turns them blue

If you were to get up close and personal with Ötzi the Iceman – the 5,000-year-old mummy of a  tattooed ,  deep-voiced  man who died and was frozen in the Alps – you’d notice that his skin is flecked with tiny bits of blue. At first, it would appear that these oddly bluish crystal formations embedded in his skin are from freezing to death or some other sort of trauma, but it’s actually a mineral called  vivianite  (or blue ironstone) and it happens to form quite often on corpses left in iron-rich environments. For Ötzi, the patches of vivianite are  from him resting  near rocks with flecks of iron in them, but other cases are way more severe. According to Chris Drudge at Atlas Obscura , a man named John White was buried in a cast iron coffin back in 1861. During those days, coffins often had a window for grieving family members to peer inside even if the lid was closed during the funeral. Sometime after he was buried, that window broke, allow...
Post a Comment
Read more

It's Official: Time Crystals Are a New State of Matter, and Now We Can Create Them

Peer-review has spoken. Earlier this year , physicists had put together a blueprint for how to make and measure time crystals - a bizarre state of matter with an atomic structure that repeats not just in space, but in time, allowing them to maintain constant oscillation without energy. Two separate research teams managed to create what looked an awful lot like time crystals  back in January,  and now both experiments have successfully passed peer-review for the first time, putting the 'impossible' phenomenon squarely in the realm of reality. "We've taken these theoretical ideas that we've been poking around for the last couple of years and actually built it in the laboratory,"  says one of the researchers , Andrew Potter from Texas University at Austin. "Hopefully, this is just the first example of these, with many more to come." Time crystals  are one of the coolest things physics has dished up in recent months, because they point to a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Dark Side Of The Love Hormone Oxytocin

New research shows oxytocin isn't the anti-anxiety drug we thought it was. Oxytocin, the feel-good bonding hormone released by physical contact with another person, orgasm and childbirth (potentially encouraging  monogamy ), might have a darker side. The  love drug  also plays an important role in intensifying  negative emotional memories  and increasing feelings of fear in future stressful situations, according to a new study. Two experiments performed with mice found that the hormone activates a signaling molecule called extracellular-signal-related kinases (ERK), which has been associated with the way the brain  forms memories   of fear . According to Jelena Radulovic, senior author on the study and a professor at Northwestern University's medical school, ERK stimulates fear pathways in the brain's lateral septum, the region with the highest levels of oxytocin. Mice without oxytocin receptors and mice with even more oxytocin receptors tha...
Post a Comment
Read more