According to a new study, liquid water may also be present at the very edge of the solar system. for instance, on Pluto – deep underground.
An analysis of the images obtained from the NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft showed that the dwarf planet that was stripped of this status had an underground ocean when Pluto was just formed — 4.5 billion years ago. This ocean can surround its rocky core.
If this is true, then oceans can be a common occurrence even at the edge of the solar system. They may even have life. This may “change our understanding of the Kuiper belt,” an area of ice objects outside Neptune’s orbit, says planetary scientist Adin Denton from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, USA.
Despite the huge distance to the Sun, equal to almost 6 billion kilometers, there is liquid water on Pluto under ice cover: New Horizons discovered important signs of this, passing through the Kuiper belt in 2015.
Scientist Carver Bierson from the University of California at Santa Cruz examined two scenarios. If Pluto had a “cold start”, then any water beneath its surface would first freeze and then begin to melt under the influence of heat from decaying radioactive elements in the core of the dwarf planet, after which it would again freeze. In this scenario, Bierson expected to see cracks and ripples on the icy surface of Pluto – these would be traces of its contraction due to freezing and expansion due to melting ice, mountains and gorges.
Bierson’s second scenario provides for a “warm start” to Pluto. The ocean would be liquid from the start, and then it would gradually freeze. In this case, only cracks will be visible on the surface – gorges formed during freezing and, accordingly, compression. And this is exactly what Bierson and his colleagues found in the pictures taken by the New Horizons – the liquid ocean of Pluto is almost as old as the dwarf planet itself.
A team of scientists discovered cracks on the surface of Pluto on the opposite side from the large crater Heart of Pluto (Tombo region). They can be traces of shock waves that appeared after a collision with a meteorite, which formed a huge basin. The wave swept below the surface of the planet and hit it from below, at the point opposite from the point of collision.
New Horizons Team
Pluto can have not only a large ocean with a depth of 150 kilometers or more, but also a mineral-rich core. Astrobiologists believe that the interaction of water and minerals can provide not only energy, but also nutrients for life.
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