PLUTO MAY HAVE DEEP, ANCIENT UNDERGROUND OCEAN

LAUREL KORNFELD APRIL 14TH, 2020



Sputnik Planitia, the impact basin that makes up the left side of Pluto’s heart feature. Image Credit:SWRI, JHUAPL, NASA

Two new studies of data collected by the New Horizons spacecraft during its 2015 Pluto flyby suggest the dwarf planet has a deep subsurface ocean that may have been present all 4.5 billion years of Pluto’s existence.

Sputnik Planitia, the left side of Pluto’s famous heart feature, was formed by a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) that impacted Pluto in the early years of the solar system. Lines visible on the opposite side of Sputnik Planitia may have been produced by shock waves from that impact and suggest ancient Pluto had an underground ocean at least 93 miles (150 km) thick.

A report on the first study was supposed to be presented at this year’s Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Woodland, Texas, in mid-March. That conference as canceled due to the coronavirus crisis. The second study was published in October 2019.

The presence, age, and origin of a large subsurface ocean on Pluto puts the small planet in the growing list of underground ocean worlds that could harbor microbial life, such as Jupiter’s moon Europa, Saturn’s moons Titan and Enceladus, dwarf planet Ceres, and Neptune’s moon Triton. It also raises the possibility that other dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt may have similar underground oceans that could also harbor microbial life, transforming scientists’ notion of what constitutes a star’s habitable zone.

More:
https://www.spaceflightinsider.com/missions/solar-system/pluto-may-have-deep-ancient-underground-ocean/