2 New Moons of Pluto Found

[Malenfant]

I just have a question..
That 2 moons are irregular body?

Given their small size, it's unlikely that they're spherical - they're probably asteroidal in shape.

[Dollan]

I just have a question..
That 2 moons are irregular body?

Given their small size, it's unlikely that they're spherical - they're probably asteroidal in shape.

Yes, to get away from the more ridiculous aspects of this thread.... **chuckles**

I wonder if we're looking at satellites created through collisional processes after the formation of the body, rather than during its formation, such as what created the moon. Of course, this doesn't take into account Charon; I doubt a great ruddy asteroid would split the planet and make two such large objects.

I remember seeing an illustration when I was a kid, of Pluto and Charon. Charon was this great lump, orbiting above a Pluto that looked as if it had had its side ripped out. Not a very scientific illustration, to be sure.....

...John...

[Malenfant]

You can get some rather nice views of Pluto-Charon from the new moons, using Grant's ssc additions. Finally we can have a place to get the classic scifi view of two big crescents in the sky

Hrm. Well, actually they're not THAT big... Pluto is about 2 degrees across in P1's sky and Charon varies from 48" to 1?° 30 depending on whether it's on the far side or near side of Pluto relative to P1. Still, that means Pluto would appear about four times the size of Earth's moon in P1's sky, and Charon would range from a little bigger than Earth's moon to about three times the size. So it'd still look darn pretty . And when they're full in P1's sky, Pluto and Charon might look to be around magnitude -8 to -9 each (possibly. My planetary magnitudes script still needs a bit of work...).

Check this 5 degree wide view out, for example:
cel://PhaseLock/Sol:Pluto:2005P1/Pluto/ ... 899&lm=103

[granthutchison]

The new version of poormoons.ssc is now up on Selden's site at http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/hutchison/poormoons.html (Would've been up much sooner if he hadn't had to cope with my various typos in the covering information.)
In addition to the Plutonian orbits given here, the only other change is that it includes the new name "Daphnis" for 2005S1.

It goes with version 1.22 of numberedmoons.ssc, available on the CVS tree at http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/celestia/celestia/extras/numberedmoons.ssc?rev=1.22&view=log, which includes the recently discovered Saturnians 2004S1-2004S6.

Grant

[PlutonianEmpire]

A screenshot I made of the new moons



The evil twin moons of Pluto! *scary music*

[Scorpiove]

A screenshot I made of the new moons



The evil twin moons of Pluto! *scary music*

Just as long as you realize you could never really terraform Pluto . Sure it can hold onto a small ammount of atmosphere at its very cold temperature, but if you warmed it up to earth's temperature it wouldn't beable to hold any atmosphere at all. Infact if you could warm it up to Earth's average temerature it might resemble a comet!

[PlutonianEmpire]

nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!

lol

[SittingDuck]

Is there a minimum size for a planet for it to indefinitely (well, lets say 5 billion years) hold on to its atmospherew ithout it slowly leaking away. Well..lets just say with an earth like atmosphere.

[Malenfant]

Is there a minimum size for a planet for it to indefinitely (well, lets say 5 billion years) hold on to its atmospherew ithout it slowly leaking away. Well..lets just say with an earth like atmosphere.

It depends on several things - the mass of the planet, the molecular weight of the gas, and the temperature at the base of the exosphere (the highest level of the atmosphere, where the atoms can fly off into space), which is partly determined by the temperature of the planet (and distance from the star).

Titan and Triton and Pluto can retain atmospheres basically because they're so cold. If you moved them to Earth's orbit, they'd rapidly lose their atmospheres.

[eburacum45]

Probably much more important than the size of the planet is the gravity. Pluto is mostly water ice, and is not very dense at all; it has a gravity 1/15th that of Earth. Such a low gravity would lead to rapid atmosphere loss.

If you were to heat the little world up it would probably melt pretty efficiently, then it would develop a very high atmosphere of water vapour.
If you were heating it up by using sunlight (possibly using mirrors, or a big lens, or a focused beam of light from the inner system) then the UV wavelengths would split this water vapour atmosphere up into hydrogen and oxygen. 1/15 gee is far too low to hang on to the hydrogen fraction of this newly split atmosphere and it would stream off, leaving oxygen. Oxygen would also react with UV to produce ozone, and this reaction apparently heats up the top of the atmopshere. With a hot layer at the top of the atmophere the oxygen would alos be lost quite rapidly.

You could however cut down on atmosphere loss by heating the little world by another means than pure sunlight.
One way could be to impact one or both of those new moons onto the surface of the planet, but that wouldn't have a very permanent effect.

Or we could pipe red and infrared wavelengths from the inner system- some kind of giant phased array laser situated near the sun could work. Redder wavelengths would cut down on the speed of atmosphere loss; Pluto would evaporate quite a bit slower under red light...

But my favorite method is paraterraforming; enclosing the little world in a membrane to keep the atmospheric gases in.


this is a paraterraformed moon of a gas giant; you can see the atmosphere roof over the northern and southern hemispheres.

[PlutonianEmpire]

In star trek, when they terraformed Earth's moon, they had it encased in a global force field to prevent atmospheric loss, if I remember correctly. Once the technology is available (hopefully it can be availalbe in RL as well as star trek), this is the method I would use to keep pluto's terraformed atmosphere.

[Scorpiove]

Is there a minimum size for a planet for it to indefinitely (well, lets say 5 billion years) hold on to its atmospherew ithout it slowly leaking away. Well..lets just say with an earth like atmosphere.

It depends on several things - the mass of the planet, the molecular weight of the gas, and the temperature at the base of the exosphere (the highest level of the atmosphere, where the atoms can fly off into space), which is partly determined by the temperature of the planet (and distance from the star).

Titan and Triton and Pluto can retain atmospheres basically because they're so cold. If you moved them to Earth's orbit, they'd rapidly lose their atmospheres.

Yes Titan is the perfect example. It has a thicker atmosphere than Earth only because it is so cold. Mars for example is more massive than Titan yet it still was to warm of a planet to keep most of its atmosphere. But yeah many things contribute to the ammount of atmosphere a planet has. The more massive a planet is the warmer it can be and still have one..... less massive and it will have to be colder. Can't have both!

[Malenfant]

Yes Titan is the perfect example. It has a thicker atmosphere than Earth only because it is so cold. Mars for example is more massive than Titan yet it still was to warm of a planet to keep most of its atmosphere. But yeah many things contribute to the ammount of atmosphere a planet has. The more massive a planet is the warmer it can be and still have one..... less massive and it will have to be colder. Can't have both!

Plus it also works the other way round - if you had an Earth mass planet out where Pluto is, it could easiily hold onto Hydrogen and Helium, so you'd probably be looking at a gas giant instead of a terrestrial world.