Artistic representation of the huge and slow impact on Pluto that led to the heart-shaped structure on its surface. Credit: University of Bern, Thibaut Roger, editedgot a giant heart-shaped feature on its surface has finally been solved by an international team of astrophysicists led by theand members of the National Center of Competence in Research PlanetS.
“The formation of Sputnik Planitia provides a critical window into the earliest periods of Pluto’s history,” said Adeene Denton, a planetary scientist at the UArizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory who co-authored the paper. “By expanding our investigation to include more unusual formation scenarios, we’ve learned some totally new possibilities for Pluto’s evolution, which could apply to otherView of Pluto taken by NASA’s New Horizons space probe on July 14, 2015.
“Pluto’s core is so cold that the rocks remained very hard and did not melt despite the heat of the impact, and thanks to the angle of impact and the low velocity, the core of the impactor did not sink into Pluto’s core, but remained intact as a splat on it,” Ballantyne said.
The new study offers an alternative perspective, according to the authors, pointing to simulations in which all of Pluto’s primordial mantle is excavated by the impact, and as the impactor’s core material splats onto Pluto’s core, it creates a local mass excess that can explain the migration toward the equator without a subsurface ocean, or at most a very thin one.
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