Pluto's atmosphere is starting to disappear

[Judi Lynn]

By Chelsea Gohd about 9 hours ago



(Image credit: NASA)

Pluto's atmosphere is going through a strange transformation, scientists are finding.

The icy dwarf planet, which lies over 3 billion miles (4.8 billion kilometers) away from Earth in the Kuiper Belt, caught astronomers' attention as it passed in front of a star back in 2018.

With the star backlighting Pluto, the team of researchers was able to make observations of the dwarf planet and its atmosphere. With this unique view, they came to a surprising conclusion, which they describe in a new study.

The astronomers found evidence that Pluto's atmosphere is starting to disappear.

More:
https://www.livescience.com/pluto-atmosphere-may-be-disappearing

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

1. Oh, gosh.

In somewhat related Pluto news, you can find your local Pluto time, which is always shortly before sunrise or shortly after sunset. If you go outside at that precise time, you will see what the light would be on the equator on Pluto at high noon, which is a whole lot larger than the totally black night most depictions of Pluto show.

Here's a link:

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/dwarf-planets/pluto/plutotime/

[eppur_se_muova]

2. Meh. It's only seasonal variation. Pluto's orbital period is 248 Earth years ...

... so its seasons take that long to go through a cycle. Atmosphere should snow out every winter, to no one's surprise.

Much of the change in Pluto's seasons is due to increasing or decreasing distance from the sun caused by its eccentric orbit, though its spin axis is also tilted very sharply from its orbital plane. Nothing new or unexplained here, except maybe in the fine details.