Pluto No Longer An Outcast
March 14th 2011 05:26
Category: Jupiter
These images taken by the Hubble telescope are perhaps the clearest image we have of Pluto
Image enhancement undertaken by NASA computer specialists.
Even with our largest telescopes on Earth our view of Pluto is rather limited.
Hopes of obtaining better more close up images rests with the New Horizons space probe due to reach the distant planet in 2015.
Until then, we have to rely on earth based and Hubble images to get some sort of idea of what Pluto may look like.
Pluto is starting to look promising ,it is no longer an outcast dwarf planet it has an atmosphere the surface temperature much warmer than once thought.
Wide angel image of Pluto with Moon Charon
Since the discovery of Pluto in 1930 all we could see was a dot of light one of the main reasons Earth based telescopes cannot obtain a clear image of Pluto is because of distance and Pluto is a very small dwarf planet. Another reason is the Earth’s atmosphere causes turbulence and makes any image of Pluto extremely fuzzy.
Observations taken with the Very Large Telescope (VLT) has provided more information on Pluto.
Astronomers using the VLT have been able to “see” the atmosphere of the dwarf planet Pluto using very sophisticated computer modeling software. Astronomers also found unexpectedly large amounts of methane in the atmosphere.
CURRENT MOON
Other findings concluded that Pluto’s atmosphere is hotter than the surface by about 40 degrees, although it still only reaches a frigid minus 180 degrees Celsius.
Pluto, which is about a fifth the size of Earth, is composed primarily of rock and ice. Pluto is 40 times further from the Sun than the Earth. Pluto’s surface temperature of around than can go down to minus 220 degrees Celsius!.
Pluto may yet surprise us all when new images are obtained from the New Horizons space probe in 4 years time.
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