Charon has Geysers too |
Charon has Geysers too |
Jul 18 2007, 04:08 PM
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#1
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Member Group: Members Posts: 531 Joined: 24-August 05 Member No.: 471 |
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The only mechanism that explained the data was cryovolcanism, the eruption of liquids and gases in an ultra-cold environment. This action could be occurring on timescales as short as a few hours or days, and at levels that would recoat Charon to a depth of one millimeter every 100,000 years. ---------- - Charon: An Ice Machine in the Ultimate Deep Freeze -------------------- - blue_scape / Nico -
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Jul 19 2007, 01:44 PM
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#2
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Member Group: Members Posts: 509 Joined: 2-July 05 From: Calgary, Alberta Member No.: 426 |
Hmm. This is interesting.
I wouldn't have thought that something as small as Charon could still have liquid water in its interior. This isn't like Enceladus or Miranda where a big gas-giant planet is available to power tidal heating. Just to speculate: My understanding is that a lot of the Earth's uranium floated to the crustal layer during the planet's formation. You'd expect such a heavy element to sink, but uranium likes to combine chemically with oxygen, and that provides it with a lot of buoyancy. On a body like Charon, though, the uranium would only be able to float to the top of the core -- where it would remain, insulated by a 500-km-deep layer of ice. So should we expect ice/rock bodies like Pluto, Charon and Triton to hold onto their radiothermal heat more efficiently than similarly-sized rocky bodies? (Assuming we could find any similarly sized rocky bodies, of course.) |
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