Article 3RCCC Frozen Pluto has wind-blown dunes made of methane sand

Frozen Pluto has wind-blown dunes made of methane sand

by
Scott K. Johnson
from Ars Technica - All content on (#3RCCC)
pluto_dunes-800x863.jpg

Enlarge / Those finger-print like patterns are dunes on the plain adjacent to the peaks of the al-Idrisi Montes. (credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute)

Part of the wonder of seeing new worlds is the radical difference from the planet you know. But if you know a little bit about the processes that shape our Earth, it's also enthralling to see those same processes play out under alien conditions. It's a marriage of exotic and familiar, like an instantly recognizable melody appearing in a style of music you're hearing for the first time.

One familiar process is the formation of dunes. Large, repeating ridges of wind-blown sand can form in the desert, but they can also form as small ripples can on sandy stream bottoms or beaches. Wherever you have solid particles in a moving medium, dune-like landforms are possible. And we have seen plenty of them on Mars, on Titan, and even on comet 67P, despite its lack of a substantial atmosphere. In a new paper led by Plymouth University's Matt Telfer, researchers working on the images from the New Horizons probe add another weirdo to the list of dune-bearing worlds-the dwarf planet Pluto.

Solid methane

Obviously, Pluto looks a bit different from the sand sea of the Sahara. Hanging out around -230C, its surface is mainly covered with solid forms of substances we know as gases, like nitrogen, carbon monoxide, and methane. With an atmosphere that is 100,000 times thinner than ours, it's hard to imagine winds pushing much of anything.

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