Tuesday, December 5 2023 – 19:05 WIB
VIVA Digital – Nearly 18 years ago, astronomers discovered a mini ice world called Eris billions of miles from Neptune. The planet is Eris.
This planet is often compared to Pluto, which also has a small size. However, the difference is that Eris has never been visited by a human-made robot.
This is because Eris is very far away, even from astronauts’ observations, Eris only appears as a single pixel of light. That’s why scientists know so little about what happens there.
Illustration of a woman playing in the snow.
From what little is known, Eris is said to have a frozen atmosphere and snow falling to the surface, thanks to its location at the edge of the solar system. It is about 68 times farther from the sun than Earth is.
Quoting the report Space, Tuesday 5 December 2023, now, according to data from a radio telescope in Chile, scientists are starting to reveal more about Eris. They said some of the ice there was starting to melt.
They say this process causes Eris to look less like a solid, rocky planet and “more like soft cheese or something,” study co-author Francis Nimmo of the University of California Santa Cruz said in a statement.
Although much is still unknown about Eris, the planet is thought to be Pluto’s exact twin because they are both exactly the same size.
In fact, when it was first discovered in 2005, Eris appeared to be slightly larger than Pluto, sparking debate among scientists. This made the International Astronomical Union (IAU) clarify the definition of a planet and reduce Pluto’s status to a dwarf planet.
It was thanks to this debate within the scientific community that, in 2006, the IAU named the dwarf planet Eris, after the Greek Goddess of Discord.
For the latest study, Nimmo and colleague Mike Brown, the Caltech astronomer who led the discovery of Eris in 2005, estimated the mass of a very small Eris, namely Dysnomia.
They say Eris and its satellite are tidally locked, meaning they are facing the same direction as each other.
Scientists suspect this happened because the small moon “raised” Eris’ tides, causing the dwarf planet to rotate for 4.5 billion years.
“The rock contains radioactive elements, and those elements produce heat. And that heat has to escape somehow,” Nimmo said.
“So when heat escapes, it drives slow rotation in the ice.” he continued
The research is described in a paper published Nov. 15 in the journal Science Advances.
2023-12-05 12:05:01
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