NASA Says Pluto Has Blue Skies and Frozen Water, Good News For Those Hoping To Find Alien Life
News out of Florida from NASA may have Pluto edging Mars out as the coolest other planet in the sky. Sharing new images from the New Horizons space craft, scientists said they’d discovered the dwarf planet has mighty blue skies. Pluto’s skies aren’t quite our sort of atmosphere. Instead they’re more of a haze. The news, though, still means big things for NASA and space geeks alike.
Earlier this week Dr. Alan Stern, a lead researcher at NASA, alluded to the big announcement by saying “this world is alive,” and that his team had “amazing” announcements right around the corner.
Pluto’s sky isn’t too sunny but the shots New Horizon’s flyby caught of it show a bright blue atmospheric haze. Full of red and gray particles, scientists can’t get over how it scatters blue light so far out in the solar system. Stern could finally chat the amazing news he said he was “floored by,” adding: “Who would have expected a blue sky in the Kuiper Belt? It’s gorgeous,”
Twilight is constant on Pluto, 3.6 billion miles from the sun. Scientists think the blue will help them better understand what makes up Pluto’s high-altitude atmosphere so far from daylight.
In other cool news, the NASA team also discovered exposed ice patches across the dwarf planet’s surface. The patches look red to the naked eye because of high concentrations of thorin particles. These particles may also be the reason for such blue skies. Ice patches may indicate a subsurface ocean on Pluto. If so, Stern noted that given our ideas of what life is on Earth, there’s a chance there’s living things on Pluto too.
Billions of miles away, New Horizons is still going strong. We’ll see if it brings back news of aliens while journeying around the coolest planet in the Kuiper Belt.
Source
Source
