Does Pluto have a tail?

Source: Sen.com via Christian Science Monitor

Does Pluto have a tail?

By Paul Sutherland, Sen JULY 19, 2015

Sen—NASA’s New Horizons team revealed fresh findings about Pluto today including a close-up of a vast “cracked” and icy plain and the existence of a tail caused by the escaping atmosphere.

Opening a press conference, Jim Green, director of Planetary Science at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said: “What a historic week!” And the mission’s principal investigator Alan Stern said: We’ve just had the most fun. Pluto’s becoming a brand. It sells itself. You don’t really have to work that hard!” He added: “I’m a little biased, but I think the Solar System saved the best for last!”

First image shown was a heavily pixellated picture of one of Pluto’s tiny moons, Nix. Stern, from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado, said that despite the low resolution, it showed in twice as many pixels as the best Earth-based image of Puto, which was taken with the Hubble Space Telescope.

Another image showed how early measurements have revealed an excess of the gas carbon monoxide over the bright, heart-shaped region. Stern said that no other concentration of the gas anything like that had been detected elsewhere on Pluto.

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