Pluto // Current TV

Fifth Moon Discovered Around Pluto

A fifth moon orbiting the dwarf planet Pluto has turned up in new Hubble Space Telescope images. Planetary scientists say the newfound moon serves as yet another reminder of how little we really know about this remote, chaotic world.

"Every time we look harder, we find new stuff," said Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., and a member of the moon's discovery team. In recent decades, he and his colleagues have identified signs of an atmosphere on the dwarf planet, as well as polar caps, a high albedo (highly reflective surface), and of course, a growing collection of moons.

But in-depth investigation of Pluto has proven tremendously difficult from 3 billion miles away. The best images we have of the icy world come from the Hubble Telescope, but to the untrained eye, they're not much to behold. At a slim 1,429 miles wide — roughly the distance from Maine to the tip of Florida — Pluto will likely remain a dim blur until NASA's New Horizons spacecraft arrives there in July 2015.

RELATED: Are you scientifically literate? Take our quiz!

What secrets might lie in wait? [The Greatest Mysteries of the Planets]

For one thing, the dwarf planet could possess a set of everyone's favorite cosmic accessories. "It's a very distinct possibility and the theoretical arguments are very strong that Pluto has rings that come and go with time," Stern told Life's Little Mysteries.

Space rocks and other debris litter the Kuiper belt, where Pluto resides, and they probably pepper the icy world and its moons. "The moons are being hit all the time, and the ejecta [collision debris] escapes, making a ring," Stern said. "And then radiation and gravity depletes the ring through erosion."

Computer models of this cycle suggest that all the dwarf planet's rings sometimes get eroded before a new one forms. "When you model that on a computer there is randomness to [the spacing of the collision events], and so the rings come and go according to these models," he said.

Beneath those fleeting rings, and beneath Pluto's thin, nitrogen-rich atmosphere, it's anyone's guess how the surface will appear when viewed up close. In Hubble images, the dwarf planet's mottled façade varies between extremes of charcoal black, dark orange and white. What materials compose these assorted regions? And do they give rise to cold-liquid-spewing cryovolcanoes or geysers? The surface's geochemistry might even hint at a giant underground ocean. [The True Stories of 5 Mystery Planets]

More data is also needed to clarify how Pluto wound up in its frigid Kuiper belt domain. Astronomers think it and its neighbors formed from the same disk of material around the sun that coalesced into the other major bodies in the solar system. But at some point early on, a planetary collision probably sent Pluto ricocheting far beyond the rest, forever to carry the mark of this fateful encounter in the form of its strange, oval path around the sun, which lies off the plane of the other planetary orbits.

Considering all the mysteries that remain, Pluto's newfound moon almost definitely won't be the last of its surprises. "When New Horizons gets there, I think it's going to knock our socks off," Stern said. "It's going to be a whole new world."

http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2012/0716/Fifth-moon-discovery-reminds-us-how-little-we-know-about-PlutoA fifth moon orbiting the dwarf planet Pluto has turned up in new Hubble Space... more

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Pluto's Expanding Atmosphere Confounds Researchers

Recent observations of Pluto reveal that the icy orb’s atmosphere has expanded... more

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Happy Birthday New Horizons, the Little Probe (Still) Racing for Pluto

We've launched probes all over the place. We've snapped and beamed back pictures of every spot in the solar system. Except Pluto. Call it a planet. Call it a dwarf planet. Either way, it's the last unknown. Not for long.

New Horizons' January 2006 launch beat Pluto's highly controversial downgrade later that year. But even if it hadn't, the mission, despite sounding like a dating service, is of great importance to our understanding of our little corner of the galaxy. After escaping Earth's atmosphere with a greater velocity than any other probe in history, New Horizons made its way straight for Pluto—and is halfway there now. Although the tiny frost ball is the name of the game, New Horizons has managed to snap some absolutely gorgeous planetary portraits along the way, picking up speed as it slingshots its way through their gravitational fields.

Even within its first year of hurtling away from the sun, New Horizons was able to spot Pluto from a distance of 2.6 billion miles away. Just a speck, really. A speck among a lot of other specks. But it proved the probe's ability to take (relatively) sharp pics, of things billions of miles away—instrumental for the mission's ultimate closeups of Pluto.

In the meantime, we wait. And enjoy the pretty pictures. But why go at all? Why spend $700 million in tax dollars to fly by (not enough fuel to stop and orbit, mind you) an ice ball that's not even a planet anymore?

To learn about ourselves. You see, the frosty planets at the outer reaches of the Solar System—a zone known as the Kuiper Belt—can tell us a lot about our own orb. And Pluto is the only one that's still pretty mysterious to us. As NASA explains, "The ice dwarfs are ancient relics that formed over 4 billion years ago. Because they are literally the bodies out of which the larger planets accumulated, the ice dwarfs have a great deal to teach us about planetary formation. New Horizons seeks those answers." As well, "Pluto's atmosphere is escaping to space like a comet, but on a planetary scale. Nothing like this exists anywhere else in the solar system. It is thought that the Earth's original hydrogen/helium atmosphere was lost to space this way. By studying Pluto's atmospheric escape, we can learn a great deal about the evolution of Earth's atmosphere."

We'll also, perhaps more interestingly, learn a hell of a lot about Pluto—because right now we don't know much. By flying by and taking pictures, we'll be able to map Pluto's dark surface in unprecedented detail. Impressive stuff.

But it won't be until 2015 when New Horizons glides close enough to Pluto. And by close, I mean 6,200 miles away—but that sure beats 2.6 billion. And then, it'll just keep going. Another decade or so and it'll be out of the Solar System. Going, and going, and going. But that's a long way from now. Today, let's just celebrate the five year mark, and wish the little guy a pleasant four more until it hits Pluto. We wish you luck on the other half of the trip, and a very cold happy birthday.

http://gizmodo.com/5737091/happy-birthday-new-horizons-the-little-probe-still-racing-for-plutoWe've launched probes all over the place. We've snapped and beamed back... more

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Three Extraterrestrial Spaceships Will Attack Earth In 2012?

Sensational statement is that, three giant spaceships are heading towards earth. The... more

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NY Times Sunday Book Review: Forbidden Planet HOW I KILLED PLUTO And Why It Had It Coming By Mike Brown

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/02/books/review/Lord-t.html

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Archetypal Astrology and Transpersonal Psychology: The LSD Research of Richard Tarnas and Stanislav Grof

In the mid-1960’s, a young Czechoslovakian psychiatrist working at the... more

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Loose Balls by Terry Pluto - Bruce’s Book Club with Bruce McToose

The book Loose Balls by Terry Pluto is featured on Bruce’s Book Club with Bruce... more

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The new face of Pluto: changing color and ice sheet

Spurned Pluto is changing its looks, donning more rouge in its complexion and altering its iceball surface here and there.

Color astronomers surprised.

Newly released Hubble Space Telescope photos show the distant one-time planet - demoted to "dwarf planet" status in 2006 - is changing color and its ice sheets are shifting.

The photos, released by NASA Thursday, paint a Pluto that is significantly redder than it had been for the past several decades. To the layman, it has a yellow-orange hue, but astronomers say it has about 20 percent more red than it used to have.

The pictures show icy frozen nitrogen on Pluto's surface growing and shrinking, brightening in the north and darkening in the south. Astronomers say Pluto's surface is changing more than the surfaces of other bodies in the solar system. That's unexpected because a season lasts 120 years in some regions of Pluto.

"It's a little bit of a surprise to see these changes happening so big and so fast," said astronomer Marc Buie of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. "This is unprecedented."

From 1954 to 2000, Pluto didn't change in color when it was photographed from Earth. But after that, it did. The red levels increased by 20 percent, maybe up to 30 percent, and stabilized from about 2000 to 2002, Buie said. It's not as red as Mars, however, Buie said.

Buie said he can explain the redness, but not why it changed so dramatically and so recently. The planet has a lot of methane, which contains carbon and hydrogen atoms. The hydrogen gets stripped off by solar winds and other factors, leaving carbon-rich areas on the surface, which tend to be red and dark.

The Hubble photos were taken in 2002 and the analysis took a few years. But why Pluto changed so quickly was such a mystery that Buie held off for years on announcing what he had found, worried that he might be wrong. However, since Pluto's moon Charon hadn't changed color in the same telescope images, he decided the Pluto findings weren't an instrument mistake.

His analysis also found that nitrogen ice was shifting in size and density in surprising ways. It's horribly cold on Pluto with, paradoxically, the bright spots being the coldest at about -382 degrees Fahrenheit. Astronomers are still arguing about the temperatures of the warm dark spots, which Buie believes may be 30 degrees warmer than the darker areas.

Part of the difficulty in figuring out what is going on with Pluto is that it takes the dwarf planet 248 years to circle the sun, so astronomers don't know what conditions are like when it's is farthest from the sun. The last time Pluto was at its farthest point was in 1870, which was decades before Pluto was discovered. Unlike Earth, Pluto's four seasons aren't equal lengths of time.

Buie's explanation makes sense, said retired NASA astronomer Stephen Maran, co-author of a book on Pluto. "Pluto is interesting and poorly understood, whether it qualifies as a planet or not," he said.Spurned Pluto is changing its looks, donning more rouge in its complexion and altering... more

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Hubble sees Pluto changing color, ice sheet cover

WASHINGTON – Spurned Pluto is changing its looks, donning more rouge in its... more

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The Decade, in 7 Minutes

Newsweek has boiled down the the first decade of this millennium into a seven minute... more

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What is Redshift?

If the lines in the spectrum of the light from a star or galaxy appear at a lower frequency (shifted toward the red) than where they are observed in the spectrum of the Sun, we say this object exhibits 'positive redshift'. The accepted explanation for this effect is that the object must be moving away from us. This interpretation is drawn by analogy with the downward shift in the pitch of a train whistle as it passes through a railroad crossing and then speeds away from us. The question is: Is recessional velocity the only thing that can produce a redshift, as modern astrophysicists presume? It has become clear that the answer to that question is an emphatic NO!

But a high redshift value does not necessarily mean the object is far away. There is another, more important cause of high redshift values.

Halton C. Arp is a professional astronomer who, earlier in his career, was Edwin Hubble's assistant. He has earned the Helen B.Warner prize, the Newcomb Cleveland award and the Alexander von Humboldt Senior Scientist Award. For years he worked at the Mt. Palomar and Mt. Wilson observatories. While there, he developed his well known catalog of "Peculiar Galaxies" that are misshapen or irregular in appearance.

Arp discovered, by taking photographs through the big telescopes, that many pairs of quasars (quasi-stellar objects) which have extremely high redshift z values (and are therefore thought to be receding from us very rapidly - and thus must be located at a great distance from us) are physically associated with galaxies that have low redshift and are known to be relatively close by. Arp has photographs of many pairs of high redshift quasars that are symmetrically located on either side of what he suggests are their parent, low redshift galaxies. These pairings occur much more often than the probabilities of random placement would allow. Mainstream astrophysicists try to explain away Arp's observations of connected galaxies and quasars as being "illusions" or "coincidences of apparent location". But, the large number of physically associated quasars and low red shift galaxies that he has photographed and cataloged defies that evasion. It simply happens too often

Because of Arp's photos, the assumption that high red shift objects have to be very far away - on which the "Big Bang" theory and all of "accepted cosmology" is based - is proven to be wrong! The Big Bang theory is therefore falsified.If the lines in the spectrum of the light from a star or galaxy appear at a lower... more

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The Electric Universe 4

Part 4 of 4 Theory of Electric Universe easily explained in this documentary.

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The Electric Universe 3

Part 3 of 4 Theory of Electric Universe easily explained in this documentary.

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The Electric Universe 2

Part 2 of 4 Theory of Electric Universe easily explained in this documentary.

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The Electric Universe 1

Part 1 of 4 Theory of Electric Universe easily explained in this documentary.

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The Science Cartel vs. Immanuel Velikovsky

"In 1950, Immanuel Velikovsky culminated decades of research with a book titled Worlds in Collision that "proposes that many myths and traditions of ancient peoples and cultures are based on actual events." His approach was interdisciplinary, a rarity in the 20th century, taking into account astronomy, physics, chemistry, psychology, ancient history, and comparative mythology.

While recognized as "neither crank nor charlatan," Velikovsky and his ideas were denied a hearing in what same to be known as the "Velikovsky Affair."

Immanuel Velikovsky was too eminent a scholar to be dismissed outright as a kook, and he counted some respected people among his friends. (See The Einstein-Velikovsky Correspondence). Nevertheless, his Catastrophism was rejected outright by a scientific establishment that couldn't stomach an interdisciplinary challenge to its dogmatic Uniformitarianism, even after Velikovsky's predictions about the temperature of Venus and radio activity from Jupiter were proven true.

Say what you will of Velikovskian cosmology, more scientists themselves are questioning whether it is right to dismiss outright celestial events as described in ancient texts, as this article suggests – The Odyssey astronomically accurate? And exciting news just today that the largest planet of our solar system "snared a passing comet in the middle of the last century, eventually releasing it 12 years later," rings a Velikovskian bell – Jupiter had temporary moon for 12 years.

Whatever conclusions one may come to on this matter, it raises interesting questions about the tyrannical conformity of thought that plagues not only the scientific but also the economic and political spheres as well. Are not proponents of the Austrian School of Economics similarly marginalized by the academic cartel, as are advocates the traditional United States non-interventionism by the political cartel? Alternative medicine's long history of suppression by the American Medical Association is also a parallel.

Like Velikovskianism, both Austrianism and Non-interventionism touch on more dimensions of the human experience than do the "mainstream" approaches to economics and foreign policy they oppose. Velikovskianism appeals to the traditional authority of ancient texts; Austrianism appeals to the traditional authority of the discoveries of the School of Salamanca, and Non-interventionism to the traditional authority of the Founders.

Fascinating as the cosmological speculations detailed above are, they are far less convincing than the economic and political ideas mentioned in the last paragraphs. It is nothing less than scandalous that these are denied a hearing."

Rumor has it that Velikovsky's "Worlds in Collision" was the book found on Einstein's nightstand when he died. It was also a #1 best seller until the science mafia assassinated his character (less bloody than regular assassination)."In 1950, Immanuel Velikovsky culminated decades of research with a book titled... more

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Movie: Thunderbolts of the Gods

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Plasma Volcanoes

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Stars in Collision: Part 1

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Electric Sun Verified

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