{"id":3362,"date":"2016-03-28T23:02:42","date_gmt":"2016-03-29T04:02:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=3362"},"modified":"2016-03-28T23:02:42","modified_gmt":"2016-03-29T04:02:42","slug":"the-clouds-of-pluto","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2016\/03\/28\/the-clouds-of-pluto\/","title":{"rendered":"The Clouds of Pluto"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wow.\u00a0 NewScientist<\/strong><\/em> (12 March 2016, paywall) first caught my attention<\/a> on this one:<\/p>\n

Images released publicly by the New Horizons team have already shown off Pluto\u2019s surprisingly complex atmosphere, featuring many layers of haze rising above icy mountains. But in emails and images seen by New Scientist<\/i>, researchers on the mission discuss the possibility that they have spotted individual clouds, pointing to an even richer atmospheric diversity.<\/p>\n

The first sign of clouds came on 13 September last year, a few days before the public release of the haze pictures. Will Grundy of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, sent an email to a discussion list dedicated to analysing New Horizons results about Pluto\u2019s atmosphere. \u201cThere\u2019s a few fairly localized low-altitude features just above the limb that I\u2019ve drawn lame arrows pointing to, but also a few bright cloud-like things that seem to be above and cutting across the topography in the circled area,\u201d he wrote. Grundy had spotted features in the haze on the edge \u2013 or \u201climb\u201d \u2013 of Pluto that seemed to stand out from the distinct layers. But intriguingly, he had also seen a bright feature crossing different parts of the landscape, suggesting it was hovering above.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But this isn’t actually new.\u00a0 Back in 2009 ScienceNews<\/strong><\/em> published speculation<\/a> (must pay to see the entire article) that clouds on Pluto could exist:<\/p>\n

Clouds in Pluto\u2019s atmosphere may be composed of tiny frozen spherules of nitrogen or carbon monoxide, rather than snowflake-like clumps of tiny particles as previous research had suggested, new analyses suggest.<\/p>\n

Information about Pluto\u2019s atmosphere is, like that atmosphere itself, exceedingly thin because no space probes have yet visited there. So most speculations about the dwarf planet\u2019s atmosphere stem from analyses of light passing through that tenuous shroud on the rare occasions when Pluto passes in front of a distant star, says Pascal Rannou, a planetary scientist at the University of Reims in France.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Discovery.com<\/strong><\/em> covers<\/a> the more recent news:<\/p>\n

The picture above shows sections of an image attached to an email sent by Southwest Research Institute scientist John Spencer, in which he noted particularly bright areas in Pluto\u2019s\u00a0atmosphere within a New Horizons image.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the first image an extremely bright low altitude limb haze above south-east Sputnik on the left, and a discrete fuzzy cloud seen against the sunlit surface above Krun Macula (I think) on the right,\u201d Spencer wrote.<\/p>\n

While it was quickly determined after New Horizons\u2019 July 2015 flyby that\u00a0Pluto\u00a0is enveloped in a complex atmosphere comprising\u00a0layers of\u00a0blue-tinted haze, individual clouds couldn\u2019t be resolved. That may have changed as high-resolution data continues to arrive on Earth from the still-moving spacecraft, now 1.9 AU \u2014 or approximately 180 million miles \u2014 past Pluto.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Fabulous!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wow.\u00a0 NewScientist (12 March 2016, paywall) first caught my attention on this one: Images released publicly by the New Horizons team have already shown off Pluto\u2019s surprisingly complex atmosphere, featuring many layers of haze rising above icy mountains. But in emails and images seen by New Scientist, researchers on the \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3362"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3362\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3363,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3362\/revisions\/3363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}