Blog 5 – Pluto

Johns Hopkins University HUB

As we learned in class/from Dr. Stern’s Pluto talk, we really did not know a whole lot about Pluto until the historic New Horizons flyby in 2015. However, that daring team of scientists allowed us to discover new things about Pluto that people had not even fathomed before. For example, Pluto had been assumed to be a relatively “dead,” or “inactive planet,” but we discovered that Pluto actually has a “heart” of sorts that keeps the planet active. We can tell this through imaging but also through changes we observe on the planets surface. For example, the fact that Pluto’s basin faces Charon, Pluto’s moon is a result of Pluto’s heart, also known as Sputnkik Planitia. Also, Pluto might still be technically active because of the possibility that there is a vast ocean beneath the surface of Pluto, still liquid.

Pluto is not even as big as our Moon. The fascinating part is that Pluto is over 16,000 times farther from Earth than the Moon is, and yet from just one (meticulously calculated) flyby we have learned so much.