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New Study: Pluto Coloring Its Own Moon

Pluto
NASA
/
file | agency
Pluto from the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager aboard NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, taken on July 13, 2015.

A new study in the journal Nature found that Pluto is coloring the red poles of its moon Charon. It turns out, methane and other gases that escape from the dwarf planet are responsible for the effect.

It’s almost like Pluto is a graffiti artist, spray painting the poles. That how planetary scientist Will Grundy of the Lowell observatory in Flagstaff and lead author of the paper, described this new phenomenon.

When the “paint” escapes Pluto’s atmosphere, a chemical transformation takes place via solar radiation, which turns the caps red. Grundy and other scientists were curious as to how such a large surface feature became such a conspicuous color.

Besides this latest discovery, a second study found that Pluto is emitting X-rays. The low energy rays were detected last year. Until then, the most distant body in the solar system with detected X-ray emission was Saturn. 

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KJZZ senior field correspondent Kathy Ritchie has 20 years of experience reporting and writing stories for national and local media outlets — nearly a decade of it has been spent in public media.