New Horizons: Mission to Pluto

Photo: Hubble Space Telescope

Faintly recalling the glory of space missions like the Voyagers, Galileo, and Cassini, New Horizons will expand our view of the Solar System. Although the focus of New Horizons is deservedly-demoted-to-ice-dwarf-status Pluto (and I still think there are other targets that would have been more interesting), I have to admit I'm on the edge of my seat now that we're less than a year away from the probe's closest approach on July 14, 2015.

New Horizons will give us a much better view of what this truly distant world looks like, which will be much appreciated given this photo is as good as it gets right now. In addition, we'll see Pluto's five moons: Charon, Nix, Hydra, Styx, and Kerberos. At minimum, Charon is sure to be interesting given its size. However, I'm expecting the other moons to be boring irregular rocks. But you never know. Space missions have a way of surprising us. Who thought tiny Enceladus would end up being so amazing?

After the Pluto fly-by, New Horizons may survey other large Kuiper Belt objects. I'm not sure what's on the docket, but it's exciting that we could end up with some wonderful surprises in terms of what this mission delivers. In terms of deliverables... It will seem very petty and vindictive, but I hope this mission proves that Eris - another ice-dwarf - is actually larger than Pluto. That would hopefully, and permanently, silence the tiresome chorus of people who for some reason have their panties in a knot over Pluto no longer being a planet. While I'm certainly not in complete love with the IAU's definition of a planet, planethood is a bit like Justice Potter Stewart's oft-paraphrased definition of porn: I can't define it, but I know it when I see it. Pluto isn't a planet, and we'll just have to wait for more data and thinking to clearly explain why.

Comparison of sizes: Earth, Pluto/Charon, and the Moon

But then again...who knows? Perhaps Pluto will be so completely active or fascinating or...something that it will seem necessary to elevate it beyond the freeze-dried version of an anonymous asteroid belt denizen. Space missions always seem to surprise us; that's why I'm on the edge of my seat. There's no telling what is waiting to be discovered seven months from now!

Diamond Planet?

Read the official story (let's hope the media actually has the facts right): http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/25/us-planet-diamond-idUSTRE77O69A20110825

For most of my life I've been fascinated by astronomy and - every so often - I get back into it and read voraciously for a couple years to get back up on what's going on. Not up on the latest now, but naturally this story of a potential 'diamond planet' in a pulsar system caught my eye.

The reason I find this interesting is that - if it is confirmed - it has some interesting implications. The article speaks of the planet being a remnant of a former partner star, but I thought of something else. Theories have been floated in the past that gas giants like Neptune might form diamonds in their high pressure atmospheres that would then 'rain' down to the core of the planet.

Now this planet orbits a pulsar (which is the remnant of a star gone nova) in a very tight orbit so...what if the original planet-star system was akin to a 'hot Jupiter' that we have found to be rather common in our galaxy? (A 'hot Jupiter' is a type of gas giant that orbits its star very tightly, some are closer to their stars than Mercury is to our Sun).

The scenario I'm picturing is that the star went nova with a hot Jupiter close in (or a gas giant relatively far out that then spiraled in). The nova blew off the thick atmosphere of the gas giant (essentially hydrogen and helium with other gases thrown in for spice), leaving the core intact.  If this is the case, then this 'planet' - aside from potentially supporting the theory of 'diamond rain' in gas giant atmospheres - could also be an opportunity to directly observe the core of a gas giant planet which is something we normally would have no means of doing.

Of course, I'm sure the blast would have affected the core in some manner so it's not like looking at the core of an actual gas giant, and we have no way of knowing what the original planet was like in terms of mass and composition. It could have even been a brown dwarf, rather than a partner star or gas giant planet. Still this object could offer some information about what the deep interiors of planets like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are like.

This is all highly speculative of course, but it's exactly the kind of thing that has always fired my imagination about astronomy!