New Delhi:
In a first, Scientists have analysed the data which was released by the New Horizons flyby of Pluto last year. According to the analysis, Pluto behaves more like a planet such as Mars or Venus and less like a comet when it interacts with the solar wind, a continuous stream of charged particles that come from the Sun. Observing the material that came from the atmosphere of Pluto, scientists studied the way it interacts with the solar wind and this led to another “Pluto surprise”. This was done using the data released by New Horizons flyby of Pluto.
“This is a type of interaction we’ve never seen before anywhere in our solar system,” David J McComas, professor of astrophysical sciences at the Princeton University said. Space physicists say they now have plenty of information on how the atmosphere of Pluto interacts with the solar wind. Sun spews the plasma, known as the solar wind, into the solar system at a 160 million km per hour. Thus the planets, asteroids, comets and interplanetary space bath in a soup of mostly protons and electrons in the process.
Most researchers previously believed that Pluto was characterised more like a comet. A comet has a large region of gentle slowing of the solar wind, whereas such is not the case with a planet like Mars or Venus. According to researchers, Pluto is a hybrid, just like a car which is part gas-and part battery-powered.
“These results speak to the power of exploration. Once again we’ve gone to a new kind of place and found ourselves discovering entirely new kinds of expressions in nature,” added Alan Stern, New Horizons’ principal investigator.
Scientists believed that the gravity of Pluto would not be strong enough to hold heavy ions in its extended atmosphere because it is too far from the Sun. But, “Pluto’s gravity clearly is enough to keep material relatively confined”, McComas noted. The findings have been published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Space Physics.
