Dwarf Planet Pluto Rotation Hologram Display HD

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• published: 24 Dec 2015
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Pluto is the 2nd closest dwarf planet to the Sun, after Ceres, and was at one point classified as the ninth planet. Pluto is the largest dwarf planet but only the second most massive, with Eris being the most massive. It is also one of the largest known members of the Kuiper Belt, a shadowy disk-like zone beyond the orbit of Neptune thought to be populated by hundreds of thousands of rocky, icy bodies each larger than 62 miles (100 kilometers) across, along with 1 trillion or more comets. American astronomer Percival Lowell first caught hints of Pluto's existence in 1905 from odd deviations he observed in the orbits of Neptune and Uranus, suggesting that another world's gravity was tugging at these two planets from beyond. Lowell predicted the mystery planet's location in 1915, but died without finding it. Pluto was finally discovered in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh. Pluto got its name from an 11-year-old Venetia Burney of Oxford, England, who suggested that the new world get its name from the Roman god of the underworld. Her grandfather then passed the name on to Lowell Observatory. The name also honors Percival Lowell, whose initials are the first two letters of Pluto. Since Pluto is so far from Earth, little was known about the dwarf planet's size or surface conditions until 2015, when NASA's New Horizons space probe made a close flyby of Pluto. New Horizons showed that Pluto has a diameter of 1,473 miles (2,370 km), less than one-fifth the diameter of Earth, and only about two-thirds as wide as Earth's moon. Observations of Pluto's surface by the New Horizons spacecraft revealed mountains that reach as high as 11,000 feet (3,500 meters), comparable to the Rocky Mountains on Earth. While methane and nitrogen ice cover much of the surface of Pluto, these materials are not strong enough to support such enormous peaks, so scientists suspect that the mountains are formed on a bedrock of water ice. Pluto's surface is also covered in an abundance of methane and ethane ices. Another distinct feature on Pluto's surface is a large heart-shaped region known unofficially as Tombaugh Reggio (after Clyde Tombaugh). The left side of the reggio (an area that takes on the shape of an ice cream cone) is covered in carbon monoxide ice. Other variations in the composition of surface materials have been identified within the "heart" of Pluto. In the center left of Tombaugh Reggio is a very smooth region unofficially known by the New Horizons team as "Sputnik Planum," after Earth's first artificial satellite, Sputnik. This region of Pluto's surface lacks craters caused by meteorite impacts, suggesting that the area is, on a geologic timescale, very young — no more than 100 million years old. It's possible that this region is still being shaped and changed by geologic processes. These icy plains also display dark streaks that are a few miles long, and aligned in the same direction. It's possible the lines are created by harsh winds blowing across the dwarf planet's surface. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has also revealed evidence that Pluto's crust could contain complex organic molecules. Pluto's surface is one of the coldest places in the solar system, at roughly minus 375 degrees Fahrenheit (-225 degrees Celsius). When compared with past images, pictures of Pluto taken by the Hubble Space Telescope revealed that the dwarf planet had apparently grown redder over time, apparently due to seasonal changes. Pluto's highly elliptical orbit can make it's distance vary considerably. The dwarf planet actually gets closer to the sun than Neptune is for 20 years out of Pluto's 248-Earth-years-long orbit, providing astronomers a rare chance to study this small, cold, distant world. When Pluto is closer to the sun, its surface ices thaw and temporarily form a thin atmosphere, consisting mostly of nitrogen, with some methane. Pluto's low gravity, which is a little more than 1/20th that of Earth's, causes this atmosphere to extend much higher in altitude than Earth's. When traveling farther away from the sun, most of Pluto's atmosphere is thought to freeze and all but disappear. In the time that it does have an atmosphere, Pluto can apparently experience strong winds which can possibly create a mechanism for surface erosion. The dwarf planet probably has a rocky core surrounded by a mantle of water ice, with more exotic ices such as methane, carbon monoxide and nitrogen ice coating the surface.It remains unknown whether Pluto has a magnetic field, but the dwarf planet's small size and slow rotation suggest it has little to no such field. Pluto has five moons: Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos and Hydra, with Charon being the closest to Pluto and Hydra the most distant. Video used with permission from Giuseppe Conzo who did the excellent quality video processing to make this rotating globe of Pluto from New Horizon's map data. Credits NASA/APL/SwRI Holographic display video made by MuonRay Enterprises 2015