7 Stunning Pluto Images from NASA

#4 The Odd Couple: Pluto and Charon Together

The recent NASA.gov article on Charon describes this image:

This image highlights the striking differences between Pluto and Charon. The color and brightness of both Pluto and Charon have been processed identically to allow direct comparison of their surface properties, and to highlight the similarity between Charon’s polar red terrain and Pluto’s equatorial red terrain.

nh-pluto-charon-v2-10-1-15
Pluto and Charon are shown with approximately correct relative sizes, but their true separation is not to scale

It continues:

The team has also discovered that the plains south of the Charon’s canyon — informally referred to as Vulcan Planum — have fewer large craters than the regions to the north, indicating that they are noticeably younger. The smoothness of the plains, as well as their grooves and faint ridges, are clear signs of wide-scale resurfacing.

One possibility for the smooth surface is a kind of cold volcanic activity, called cryovolcanism. “The team is discussing the possibility that an internal water ocean could have frozen long ago, and the resulting volume change could have led to Charon cracking open, allowing water-based lavas to reach the surface at that time,” said Paul Schenk, a New Horizons team member from the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston.

Amaze your friends with this factoid: Charon does not so much orbit Pluto as to dance with the planet. Due to Charon’s size, the two bodies orbit around an empty point in space as they orbit the sun together. Further out, additional moons orbit the two of them, creating a unique collection of astronomical bodies within our solar system.

And you can challenge your friends to name all 5 of Pluto’s moons: Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra.

Next, the strange snakeskin mountains revealed by New Horizons….

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