liquid ocean tagged posts

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...

Pluto’s informally-named Sputnik Planum region is mapped, with the key indicating a wide variety of units or terrains. Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

Ever since NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto last year, evidence has been mounting that the dwarf planet may have a liquid ocean beneath its icy shell. Now, by modeling the impact dynamics that created a massive crater on Pluto’s surface, a team of researchers has made a new estimate of how thick that liquid layer might be. The study, led by Brown University geologist Brandon Johnson and published in Geophysical Research Letters, finds a high likelihood that there’s more than 100 km of water beneath Pluto’s surface...