Lionel Widmer | Contributor
Featured image: The discovery is an important step coming out of the Bergeron Centre towards understanding Pluto geologically. | Vincent Chen
Strange blade-like ice towers have been identified on Pluto by York professor John Moores of the Lassonde School of Engineering.
The research, conducted in collaboration with NASA, John Hopkins University and the Department of Space Science and Engineering has been heralded as an important step towards understanding Pluto as a geologically diverse world.
The ice pinnacles were discovered around a bowl depression, and have been named “penitentes” for their resemblance to tall pointed hoods worn by Spanish religious figures doing penance.
Prior to the discovery, penitentes had only been seen in the Andes mountain range of South America. This has been taken as an indication that there could be an atmosphere on the dwarf planet.
Moores and his team found that the ice towers on Pluto stand at up to half a kilometre tall and three to five kilometres apart, whereas those on Earth stand at only a metre tall.
They concluded that the penitentes are formed by the same process of erosion, but over a longer period of time—allowing them to develop into larger-scale structures.
“This gargantuan size is predicted by the same theory that explains the formation of [penitentes’] features on Earth,” said Moores in a press release.
To prove that the ice ridges were the same as the penitentes on earth, Moores, along with postgraduate fellow Christina Smith and a team of scientists, used an open-source planetary climate simulation.
By matching the wind speed, temperature and thinness of the atmosphere to match the conditions on Pluto, they were able to produce a model that generated patterns in the ice just like those photographed by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft in 2015.
“We were able to match the size and separation, the direction of the ridges, as well as their age: three pieces of evidence that support our identification of these ridges as penitentes,” added Moores.
This enables scientists to use penitentes to identify atmospheres on other planets, both in and outside of our own solar system.
It is already suspected that the ice blades may also exist on Europa, Jupiter’s smallest moon, but this is yet to be proven.
Moores’ original article was published in Nature: International Weekly Journal of Science on January 4.
I couldn’t prevent myself from posting a link to , which (in a long and winding way) states that a function and its Fourier transform cannot both have finite support [now it sounds highly noiolnviar][ftr me the fact that we like to write free uncharged unspinned particle Hamiltonians as p^2+V(x) is more of a mystery.]