Monday, August 19, 2024

Pluto's place.

    And already I'm ignoring the blog,


  So what do we discuss, my love affection for Pluto (the planet, and FUCK YES it's a planet).

 

                  Sure why not.

                                            P L U T O


 

  I'll give you a single reason, I mean there are multiple fantastic reasons why this (okay, technically) dwarf planet fascinates any who really pay attention from it's oddball orbit where it is both farther and nearer than Neptune depending on the time of it's solar orbit,


 

   From dipping it's reach far into the Kuiper Belt, our outer asteroid belt (it's inner sibling being the one between Mars and Jupiter) as Pluto nearly escapes the Solar System on it's nearly 250 journey around the sun, at it's farthest a frozen hell, but at it's closest to the Sun it transforms.

    Nearly a third of Pluto is ice, and as it nears the Sun it starts to develop an atmosphere of nitrogen turned hazy by the methane, escaping in frozen geysers as it escapes from frozen oceans floating over liquid seas a hundred kilometers deep until a short time during each of it's quarter millennia journey.

  Imagine a red tinted snowfall drifting across craggy cliffs and valleys while in the sky, Charon stares down at you, never moving, never shifting as both dance in the stars but never turn away from each other.


  For the more scientifically minded;

 (from Wiki)

Numerical studies have shown that over millions of years, the general nature of the alignment between the orbits of Pluto and Neptune does not change. There are several other resonances and interactions that enhance Pluto's stability. These arise principally from two additional mechanisms (besides the 2:3 mean-motion resonance).

First, Pluto's argument of perihelion, the angle between the point where it crosses the ecliptic (or the invariant plane) and the point where it is closest to the Sun, librates around 90°. This means that when Pluto is closest to the Sun, it is at its farthest north of the plane of the Solar System, preventing encounters with Neptune. This is a consequence of the Kozai mechanism, which relates the eccentricity of an orbit to its inclination to a larger perturbing body—in this case, Neptune. Relative to Neptune, the amplitude of libration is 38°, and so the angular separation of Pluto's perihelion to the orbit of Neptune is always greater than 52° (90°–38°). The closest such angular separation occurs every 10,000 years.

Second, the longitudes of ascending nodes of the two bodies—the points where they cross the invariant plane—are in near-resonance with the above libration. When the two longitudes are the same—that is, when one could draw a straight line through both nodes and the Sun—Pluto's perihelion lies exactly at 90°, and hence it comes closest to the Sun when it is furthest north of Neptune's orbit. This is known as the 1:1 superresonance. All the Jovian planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) play a role in the creation of the superresonance.

  

  But beyond all that, Pluto and it's nearest moon Charon orbit so close that some have theorized that they once shared a connected atmosphere, close enough that it might be better to consider them as a binary planet, orbiting around an external center of gravity.


    It's the stuff of cosmic horror and beauty.


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