Early Ocean Formation on Pluto tagged posts

Evidence supports ‘Hot Start’ Scenario and Early Ocean Formation on Pluto

pluto-faults-410.jpg
Extensional faults (arrows) on the surface of Pluto indicate expansion of the dwarf planet’s icy crust, attributed to freezing of a subsurface ocean. (Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/Alex Parker)

A new study suggests that Pluto and other large Kuiper belt objects started out with liquid oceans which have been slowly freezing over time. 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, contrasts with the traditiona...

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