HONG KONG: NASA on Friday announced that the first colour photos of Pluto’s atmosphere show that the dwarf planet’s skies are blue and its surface has patches of ice.
“Who would have expected a blue sky in the Kuiper Belt? It’s gorgeous,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado.
The Kuiper Belt is a 3700-billion-kilometre-wide, donut-shaped ring beyond Neptune that contains about a trillion comets and other objects, such as the dwarf planets Pluto, Haumea, Makemake and Eris.Plutonian skies are blue due to the same process that makes Earth’s skies blue, from the scattering of light in the atmosphere.
“That striking blue tint tells us about the size and composition of the haze particles,” said science team researcher Carly Howett. “A blue sky often results from scattering of sunlight by very small particles. On Earth, those particles are very tiny nitrogen molecules. On Pluto they appear to be larger — but still relatively small — soot-like particles we call tholins.”
NASA also announced that it had found patches of water on the surface, but given the average surface temperature is about 50 Kelvin, or minus 220 degrees, that water is decidedly frozen. NASA said the areas showing the most obvious water patches correspond to areas that are bright red in recently released colour images of the surface.
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