Dynamic Pluto
Pluto has finally been brought into focus thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope.
Everyone's favourite dwarf planet has been just a fuzzy dot but now a detailed look has been constructed from hundreds of images taken by the Hubble.
The images were taken during 2002 to 2003, and it took four years of computer crunching and software tweaking to create the global images.
Surprisingly, they show Pluto changed noticeably during the two-year photo shoot; the dwarf planet's colour became "redder," and astronomers could see Pluto's ice sheets were shifting.
The pictures show nitrogen ice growing and shrinking, getting brighter in the north and darker in the south.
Scientists said the images underscore that Pluto is not simply a ball of ice and rock but a dynamic world that undergoes dramatic atmospheric changes.
While they believe the changes are driven by the seasons, it may mostly come from how quickly things can change on Pluto.
This is most unexpected, especially when you take into account that a season on Pluto lasts for 120 years!
For a lot more info, click here.
Weird Science Factoid: Every year four people in the UK die putting their trousers on. There's a lesson to be learnt here...
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Authors
Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
