Pluto Is Far Stranger Than We Thought (JWST Observations)

Hello and welcome to this is Anton, and today we're going to be heading to the outskirts of the solar system in order to discuss everyone's almost planet, Pluto. Technically a dwarf planet that we officially visited almost a decade ago. And that's because in 2015 New Horizons was able to take these

incredible shots of Pluto, in the process revealing a world nobody expected. A world filled with a lot of different activity, including geological activity, and even a somewhat thin atmosphere. But now, thanks to James Webb Space Telescope and some clever ground-based observations, researchers

have now confirmed some really unusual facts about Pluto and about how this unusual world seems to work. Everything from these very strange skyscraper-sized ice blades, referred to as penitentes, to an atmosphere that seems to be actually collapsing right now. Which basically suggests that this particular

object seems to be very complex for a type of a body we expected it to be, or basically for a typical dwarf planet.

And I guess as a side note, which is actually why some scientists still think this is technically a planet. But that's beside the point. The point is that Pluto seems to be much more than just a dormant ball of ice, and does seem to contain quite a lot of activity. And here, let's start with the somewhat

crazy haze hypothesis that was actually discussed back in 2017. And as always, you can learn about this hypothesis and a lot of other studies we're discussing today in the description below. And so here, back in 2017, Xi Zhang from UC Santa Cruz proposed a somewhat unusual explanation for Plutonian atmospheric

cycles. He essentially suggested Pluto's climate is not controlled by gases like what we usually have on Earth and on Mars, but instead seems to be the result of very tiny organic haze particles. For example, here on Earth, and of course, planets like Venus, generally CO2 plays a really big role in trapping a lot of

heat on a planet and basically regulating temperatures. And yeah, sorry, climate change deniers, it is kind of true. But here, Zhang hypothesized that on Pluto, very tiny organic haze particles created by sunlight and very likely reacting with methane and nitrogen ices actually absorb energy and then release it back

into outer space as infrared light. And in this case, this would be the result of sunlight interacting with the surface of Pluto that essentially contains methane and nitrogen ices. In other words, he actually proposed a kind of a bizarre haze-regulated climate that would obviously be very different from

Mars, Venus, and Earth. And though this was a cool proposition and an interesting hypothesis, it was just a little bit difficult to prove. Mostly because Pluto is obviously very small and very, very far away. And more importantly, its moon, Charon, is so close that the heat signals from both

objects sometimes get blurred into a single object. But then, James Webb became operational and everything changed. Here, the mid-infrared instrument known as MIRI was powerful enough to finally separate Pluto and basically tell us exactly what's happening. And Zhang was right.

Pluto's upper atmosphere was roughly 3° C colder than it should be. Or basically approximately -203° C as opposed to -170.