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- The atmosphere of Pluto is in disappearing
The density of the Pluto’s atmosphere is shrinking. Thanks to the dwarf planet passing in front of a star in 2018, scientists found that the star’s atmosphere begins to slowly disappear.
New observations confirm that the atmosphere of Pluto is disappearing, while the star is moving away from the Sun. These new indices were presented on the 4th October 2021 on the occasion of an annual event organized by the American Astronomical Union. They have been detailed in the scientific review Icarus .
This team of astronomers took advantage of an event to study the star: August 15, 2018 , Pluto passed in front of a star and telescopes seized the phenomenon. “ Pluto has occulted the star UCAC4–341-187,633. The event was observed from several locations in Mexico, Texas, Wyoming and along the coast of the United States
The most powerful “central flash” seen during an occultation of Pluto
The researchers were thus able to measure the abundance of this thin atmosphere. This is not the first time that an occultation like this has been used to better understand Pluto: changes in its atmosphere have been studied in this way since the end of the 1980s. In 2015, the New Horizons probe left to explore the bottom of the solar system was able to observe Pluto more closely. Its flight over the star was an opportunity to obtain information on the density of the atmosphere of the dwarf planet. His data was consistent with the scenario of a doubling of the mass of his atmosphere every decade. “ But our observations of 2018 do not show that this trend continues from 2015 ”, notes scientist Eliot Young of the Southwest Research Institute and co-author of the study, in the press release announcing the work.
Telescopes that were in the middle of the path of Pluto’s shadow (projected onto Earth, like the moon’s shadow is projected at the time of
A start of cooling
L he atmosphere of the dwarf planet contains mostly nitrogen. This atmosphere is linked to the ice on the surface of Pluto: changes, even negligible, in the temperature of these ice sheets can have important implications for the density of the atmosphere.
It takes 248 years for Pluto to revolve around the Sun, its distance from the star varying between 30 and 50 astronomical units (1 astronomical unit is equivalent to 150 million kilometers, the Earth-Sun distance). Even though Pluto has moved away from the Sun in recent years – it therefore received less light from the star – its atmospheric density continued to increase until 2018. We could deduce that the ice reservoirs located at Pluto’s surface remained warm thanks to the heat stored under the surface of the dwarf planet (a bit like sand, heated all day by the Sun on a beach, would be warmer in the evening, because it would have stored heat ).
The observation of the occultation of 2018 suggests a beginning of cooling. In this scenario, the drop in temperatures then causes the nitrogen to freeze on the surface and, therefore, a slow disappearance of the atmosphere.
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