Gravity waves may ripple through Pluto's hazy atmosphere
Scientists are starting to get a clearer picture of how Pluto’s strange, hazy atmosphere works. Their latest discovery, concerning waves rippling through the dwarf planet's atmosphere, means that Pluto shares some unexpected similarities with Earth.
We have known about Pluto’s beautiful layers of atmospheric haze since New Horizons took a look at the back-lit dwarf planet just after its flyby in July.
As New Horizons flew past Pluto, it captured images of the haze layers as illuminated by the sun. The layers appear to be consistent in their structure -- with the height of the layers remaining the same no matter when they're observed -- but the brightness of the layers varies “depending on illumination and viewpoint,” NASA said.
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The brightness actually varied by about 30 percent, according to New Horizons data collected over parts of Pluto at 2 to 5-hour intervals.
Researchers think such shifts in brightness may be due to gravity waves, which can occur when air moves over the top of mountains. Pluto’s mountain ranges are made of water-ice and, in some places, they stretch as high as the Rockies on Earth.
Scientists have also seen gravity waves -- sometimes called buoyancy waves -- on Earth and Mars. These waves are produced when “buoyancy pushes air up, and gravity pulls it back down,” NASA said.
“Pluto is simply amazing,” New Horizons scientist Andy Cheng, in a statement.
“When I first saw these images and the haze structures that they reveal, I knew we had a new clue to the nature of Pluto’s hazes. The fact that we don’t see the haze layers moving up or down will be important to future modeling efforts.”
Scientists are trying to make models of Pluto’s complex systems, including its atmosphere, in order to learn more about how the dwarf planet has evolved.
Pluto has consistently surprised and even baffled scientists.
Before New Horizons got to Pluto, researchers expected that it would be a somewhat barren looking, cratered rock in the outer solar system, but what they found was a complicated world that posed more questions than it answered.
Scientists still aren’t sure if Pluto owes its geologically active surface to some kind of ocean beneath its crust of water-ice, or the specific processes that produced its tall mountains, but New Horizons isn’t done sending back its data to Earth.
The probe continues to be in the process of beaming back more information collected during its flyby of Pluto, and will continue doing so for about six more months.
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Miriam Kramer worked as a staff writer for Space.com for about 2.5 years before joining Mashable to cover all things outer space. She took a ride in weightlessness on a zero-gravity flight and watched rockets launch to space from places around the United States. Miriam received her Master's degree in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University in 2012, and she originally hails from Knoxville, Tennessee. Follow Miriam on Twitter at @mirikramer.
