Dwarf planet with ice is discovered
Astronomers have discovered a mysterious little dwarf planet which they believe is covered in ice and may sport the wispy remnants of an atmosphere.
The planet, nicknamed “Snow White”, lies outside Neptune and is orbiting the sun as part of the Kuiper belt — the ring of icy bodies that orbit the sun beyond Neptune.
Officially known as 2007 OR10, it is actually red, half of its surface is covered by water ice that probably spewed from ancient cryovolcanoes, researchers said.
It’s believed that the dwarf planet’s reddish hue likely comes from a thin layer of methane, the last gasps of an atmosphere that has been bleeding off into space for eons.
“You get to see this nice picture of what once was an active little world with water volcanoes and an atmosphere, and it’s now just frozen, dead, with an atmosphere that’s slowly slipping away,” lead scientist Mike Brown of California Institute of Technology was quoted as saying by SPACE.Com.
At the time of its discovery in 2007, Brown guessed that Snow White had broken off long ago from another dwarf planet, called Haumea — a weird, football-shaped body, which is sheathed in water ice. Hence, it’s nicknamed Snow White.
However, follow-up studies soon showed that Snow White, which is about half the size of Pluto, is actually quite red like many other Kuiper Belt objects.
So Brown and his team weren’t expecting to find a lot of water ice when they used the Magellan Baade Telescope in Chile to take a closer look at Snow White last year.
But, spectral data showed that water ice abounded on Snow White’s surface. “That was a big shock. Water ice is not red,” Brown said. The new findings were published in Astrophysical Journal Letters. — PTI
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