Pluto Predictions, What will NH find? Options

[Juramike]

Dunes.

And basins.

Maybe not as thoroughly chemically processed as Titan's basins, but basins.



What do you think New Horizons will find at Pluto? How will Pluto surprise us?

-Mike

[Fran Ontanaya]

Cryovolcanos and a gravity center outside both bodies could produce something interesting. Is it physically possible that moonlets like Nix and Hydra formed by aggregation at the gravity center and then migrated to their current orbits?

[Rob Pinnegar]

Cryovolcanos and a gravity center outside both bodies could produce something interesting. Is it physically possible that moonlets like Nix and Hydra formed by aggregation at the gravity center and then migrated to their current orbits?

No, they couldn't have done that -- the gravity centre (also called the barycentre in technical terms) wouldn't be a good place for aggregation. It's close to Pluto and so anything that tried to clump together there would have ended up falling onto Pluto pretty quickly. Even if something *could* have built up there, it couldn't have migrated outward, as it would have crashed into Charon on the way out.

Aggregation at the Lagrange points probably wouldn't work either. I don't have the math handy but as I recall, Charon is too massive for that to happen.

One current theory for the formation of the Pluto-Charon system, which seems to be in vogue right now, it that it was created by a giant impact early in Pluto's history. Basically, a large object hit Pluto, and some of the "splash" went into orbit and accreted into Charon. Some of the left-overs from this process ended up as Nix and Hydra.

A similar process is thought to have created the Earth-Moon system as well -- though this has been a point of controversy for a very long time in planetary astronomy.