Charon: Pluto's Eerie Twin

today's video is brought to you by War Thunder I'm going to tell you more about them in just a bit 5.2 billion kilometers from Earth on the very fringes of our solar system sits one of the most beloved celestial objects of all discovered in 1930 Pluto has officially been many things the ninth planet the largest of the dwarf planets the best known Kuiper Belt objects but one thing it has always been is popular of all our astronomy related videos none has anywhere near as many views as Pluto when it was demoted in 2006 New Mexico and Illinois both passed laws declaring it was still a planet clearly there's a lot of love for artists and neighbor yet popular as Pluto maybe there's an aspect to the former planet nine that few non-scientists are aware of the Pluto is not in fact a single planet but one part of a binary system in which two objects orbit around a shared point in space they know that second object share on and understanding its story is key to understanding Pluto as a whole in today's video Geographics is breaking out its 30 meter telescope and Examining The Spectacular story of Sharon Pluto's invisible twin foreign [Laughter] [Music] there are two moons in our solar system that dominate the rankings orbiting Jupiter Ganymede is the largest satellite of all a monster Moon bigger than Mercury One Planet over Saturn's Titan is slightly smaller but comes with a thick atmosphere that makes it appear larger yet impressive as these beasts are they only top the scoreboard in absolute terms because there's another way to rank natural satellites not by overall size but by how big they are compared to the planet they orbit audio lists like this and share on comes out at number one every single time the largest are Pluto's five moons Sharon dominates at siblings Styx NYX Kerberos and Hydra while the seconds and third biggest are a maximum of 113 kilometers wide share on boasts a width of 1212 kilometers roughly a one-third of the size of Earth's moon in the grand scheme of things of course this isn't all that big one of the most frequent ways he or C Sharon described is as being roughly the size of Texas and no disrespect to any Dale gribbles watching but Texas isn't exactly on a planetary scale our moon by contrast would cover a majority of the continental United States placed on Earth but compare the two to the planet they're orbiting and it becomes clear that Sharon is in a class of its own while our moon is about a quarter of the widths of Earth Sharon is half that of Pluto Ganymede meanwhile is less than 1 26th of the width of Jupiter in all the solar system there's no other natural satellite so similar in size to its parent Planet because of this a whole lot of scientists don't actually consider Sharon to be Pluto's Moon instead they often class Pluto and share on together as a double dwarf planet system the only binary planet in our Cosmic neighborhood and this makes sense and Sharon doesn't even orbit Pluto rather they both turn around a point in space that exists between the two pirouetting through the heavens in a Celestial dance like two lovers doing the Tango actually make that two extremely drunk lovers attempting to tango relative to the other planets the Pluto system appears to be tipped on its side making the pair look less like dancers and more like Hooch filled hobos rolling around in an Alleyway still at least they can't keep their eyes off one another tidally locked Sharon and Pluto always face the same side of one another with Sharon's orbit and Pluto's rotation each lasting 6.4 Earth days the giant Moon never budges from its spot stand on Pluto's surface while somehow avoiding and agonizing death and Sharon would always appear to hang Motionless in the same part of the sky never Rising never setting a constant Cosmic companion luckily it's also one that's visually interesting enough that the sight of it would get boring prior to the New Horizons probe swooping through the plutonian system in 2015 it was broadly assumed that Sharon would be a dull place an inert gray rock circling along dead dwarf planet we now know that that's not the case while Sharon is indeed mostly gray it's not monochrome up at the North Pole a huge patch of color is starkly visible a brownish red that mimics parts of Pluto's surface this is fascinating because it seems to show a sort of Exchange change going on between the two objects as methane leaves Pluto's atmosphere it appears to get trapped by Sharon's gravity and pulled toward the satellite's pole there sunlight slowly breaks it down until it becomes a class of organic compound called solins and this polar region isn't the only interesting part even from the surface of Pluto you'll be able to see the great scars crisscrossing Sharon including one enormous fault line thought to be over 1 600 kilometers long likewise you'll be able to make out the giant mountains and deep craters the White Park marks and the eerily smooth southern hemisphere a sign of some great cataclysm in the distant past and that's just the stuff that we were able to see with New Horizons because the probe went by so fast it only properly captured the parts of Sharon in sunlight that means we only have images of 40 of share on Surface who knows oh what other features might be lurking in the darkness waiting to be discovered and this isn't just idle speculation we have good reason to think Sharon's entire surface likely carries evidence of ancient cataclysms starting with the biggest catalystm of all the apocalyptic crash that formed Pluto and Sharon in the first place all right just before we continue with the video today I do want to say that it's brought to you by War Thunder which is the most comprehensive vehicle on my game that has ever been made you can play with more than 2 000 tanks planes helicopters ships and you could do this in Dynamic combined arms PVP battles there's also in-depth customization system there for vehicles so you can apply hundreds of 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the beginning of Sharon's existence it's currently thought Sharon didn't calmly come into being alongside Pluto had they both formed from the slow coalescing of dust and matter it's doubtful they would be so close in size though instead models show that the two were born in a much more apocalyptic way when a proto-pluto collided with a large Kuiper Belt object so powerful was the crash that it likely pulverized both objects turning the entire plutonian system into a molten burning mess that illuminated the void of space with a dull orange glow for millions of years when they finally dissipated and the shock waves died away they were no longer two independent objects but a whole family of them Pluto and share on plus the four moonlets around them forever locked into a binary system never again to be a part not that we humans would be aware of this for most of our history the impact that created the plutonian system happened long before any life arose on earth when humans did finally turn up push and its moon were too far away for us to even imagine they might exist it wasn't until the 1970s that our civilization became Advanced enough to even detect Sharon even then we only did so by fluke the date was June 22nd 1978. in Washington Jimmy Carter was in the White House Garfield had just gone into Nationwide syndication the Camp David Accords would soon be signed and out in his remote cabin the Unabomber Was preparing his first package but it's doubtful much of this was occupying James Christie's mind that summer day he was too busy trying to figure out what the heck this weird bulge on Pluto was at the time Christy was working at the U.S Naval Observatory in Flagstaff Arizona pleasingly just down the road from where Clyde tombard discovered Pluto in 1930. now Christie was trying to get a better sense of Pluto's orbit but then he checked the images noticed the weird bump and accidentally catapulted himself into the science history books rather than just a one-off the Bulge appeared in multiple images of Pluto sometimes on one side of the planet sometimes times on the other always exactly matching its rotation period of 6.4 Earth days when Christie decided to check the image archive he found it again I never before noticed Distortion stretching back into the observatory's past initially he wondered if Pluto didn't have a Giant Mountain an ancient volcano maybe even bigger than Olympus Mons on Mars as because the alternative was just too exciting to think about that it just discovered Pluto's first known satellite of course we already know that a natural satellite was exactly what Christy was looking at soon enough he was able to confirm it with help from a guy called Robert Harrington who calculated exactly what they should expect to see if the Bulge was a moon his calculations perfectly matched the images Christie was examining on July the 7th 1978 the discovery was announced to the world named share unfollowed 2 laughter like Pluto the name was related to ancient mythology of the underworld Sharon is a ferryman who brings Souls across the river but also like Pluto the name contained a secret code in 1930 Clyde tombar had accepted at the naming suggestion of Pluto partly because the first two letters were P and L the initials of the founder of the lau Observatory where he worked now in 1978 Christie chose Sharon mostly because the first four letters were the same four letters that began his wife's name Charlene after that cute little Discovery story Sharon mostly slipped out of people's Consciousness there was just too much going on in the world too much politics too much music TV for 99 of us to Care yet the distant Moon's time in the spotlight wasn't over in 2015 as New Horizons went zipping past it was going to beam back a discovery that would make the space watching World pay attention a discovery the show chair on was far more complex than anyone had ever dared dream if you've ever been to the Grand Canyon you'll know it's one of the world's greatest sites a vast Groove running through the landscape that's deep enough to swallow the Empire State Building four times over Sharon's hotline though laughs in the face of these statistics likely looping around its entire body Sharon's Grand Canyon is thought to be four times longer than Americas but its depth is where it really stands out at 7.5 kilometers from Cliff Edge to floor you'd need a stack of 16 empire state buildings to equal it in height with such mind-bending numbers it's impossible to imagine a slow process like erosion creating the fault hence why scientists believe it might be a sign Sharon once held something precious beneath its icy exterior a subsurface ocean made up of liquid water many years ago Sharon's formation left it with a lot of excess heat trapped inside its Center since Sharon is mostly water ice probably surrounding a rocky core that heat could have kept much of that water liquid not on the surface so far from the Sun Sharon shivers at a freezing minus 258 degrees Celsius but deep down beneath a layer of solid ice assembled in the past though that excess heat is thought to have run out Sharon subsurface ocean began to freeze solid and that would have led to a world shaking catastrophe if you take a bottle of beer and stick it in your freezer overnight what are you going to find in the morning that's not going to be a delicious beer lollipop it's gonna be an Unholy mess as water or water heavy drinks like beer freeze they expand the pressure of that expansion can shatter the container holding it be it a beer bottle or even an icy moon this is where scientists think Sharon got its great Canyon from from the expansion of a global ocean as it finally froze an ocean that splintered the moon's surface as surely as freezing a beer splint as a bottle hence why Sharon's southern hemisphere is so smooth the past Plains region known as Vulcan plannum was created with the remnants of that ocean came bursting forth resurfacing this world as surely as lava resurfaces ours remarkably researchers think this didn't happen all that long ago at least not on a geological scale once he recently used a computer model to show share and ocean may have only Frozen over 500 billion years ago now contrast it with how long the same team thinks the ocean existed in liquid state and was 4 billion years that's four billion years in which this tiny World on the very edges of our solar system may have contained a stable habitable environment one with potentially the right mixture of chemicals to allow extremely primitive life forms to evolve those of you who watch a lot of these Astro Graphics will have probably seen this part coming we rarely let a chance to discuss ocean worlds slip through our fingers if you wanted to take a shot every time we mentioned subsurface oceans you'll be pretty drunk sadly though we'll never know if tiny microbes did appear in the depths of Sharon's ancient ocean oh the entire moon now frozen solid any evidence that ever existed is today encased in a tomb of ice hundreds of kilometers thick yeah that doesn't mean the same fate befell Sharon's twin even as this world was freezing over its larger sibling may have retained enough heat to keep its own internal ocean liquid which means there may still be at least one sea sloshing around this double Planet system so it's time for us at last to cross the great void between Sharon and Pluto to answer a question that would have seemed Unthinkable only a decade ago is Pluto an ocean world when this Channel first launched back in the summer of 2019 one of our first videos was on Pluto which we subtitled the Frozen world even back then there was evidence that maybe this phrase wasn't 100 accurate that maybe Pluto wasn't quite so Frozen below its surface but maybe there was even an ocean down there trapped under the ice well since then the evidence for a plutonian subsurface ocean has only grown as has the number of scientists willing to speculate about oh what it may look like so this seemed like a perfect time to revisit the former planet nine both to fill in some gaps from our original video and as a handy way to compare its fate to that of its smaller twin Sharon the most obvious difference is that Pluto's ocean seems to have survived at the very least it was around until extremely recently we know this because in 2022 scientists at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder Colorado I went back over New Horizons data and found a previously unnoticed volcano field now volcanoes on Pluto wouldn't function like they do here on Earth instead of Rocky cone spew doing lava said be made of ice and erupt with jets of slushy soupy nearly frozen water known as cryovolcanism this process would only be possible if there was a source of Briny water below the surface and a lack of impact craters in this volcano field suggest it formed from such eruptions relatively recently perhaps as little as 100 million years ago that would mean recent liquid water on Pluto not only that but there's no reason to believe it froze in the intervening years with a larger size than share on Pluto should have enough internal heat from decaying radioactive elements alone to keep any ocean liquid for many more eons to come and that's not even counting the after effects of massive impact recently more and more models have started to show that most Kuiper Belt objects may have evolved not from the slow condensing of dust and gas but from a series of massive impacts like the one that created Sharon such impacts would have left even more heat trapped inside Pluto residual heat that could now be responsible for maintaining its ocean if that's the case then researchers suggested that the subsurface ocean might be anywhere between 40 and 150 kilometers deep and overwhelming amount of water for a world so far from the sun's warming Rays it also suggests that Pluto and cheron may not be the only system harboring water beyond the orbit of Neptune if Kuiper Belt objects commonly formed in massive collisions then other dwarf planets could also be hiding similar oceans far from a lifeless region of icy waste the edge of the solar system could be one of the most inhabitable places of all still it's worth pointing out that the existence of this ocean is not a given while a large number of planetary scientists think it's probably there we simply don't have the sort of evidence that we do for other subsurface oceans like those on the moon's Europa and Enceladus the case for a plutonian ocean is purely circumstantial nonetheless just reading some of the reasoning can be enough to excite Layman like us especially when you hear about the weird conjunction between Pluto's biggest surface feature and share them if you've ever got a bit baked in Marvel at a photo of Pluto you've probably been drawn to to the large heart-shaped area near the dwarf planet center though officially as tombar Regio this heart is interesting for many reasons one of them is that it's bright as low the glacial nitrogen ice planes of Sputnik penetia sits on the exact opposite side of Pluto to share on since Sharon always maintains the same spot in the sky having such a dramatic region exactly opposite it seems like a massive coincidence in fact it seems so massive that New Horizons lead investigator Alan Stern has suggested it can't be down to chance instead he favors a process known as Polar wonder that could have seen the glacier drift into this position over millions of years the only thing that could drive such a drift would be a subsurface ocean intriguing as all of this is though it still only amounts to speculation if we want to ever Truly find out what's going on below the surfaces of both Pluto and Sharon there's only one realistic way to do so mount a return Mission a second New Horizons probe that wouldn't just fly by this time but stay and study the double dwarf planet system in depth luckily such a mission is already in the early stages of planning [Music] in ancient mythology Persephone was the queen of the underworld married to the god Pluto if the team behind the NASA study concept out their way though her name will soon be associated with something much more high-tech an Orbiter probe that will explore both Sharon and Pluto in unprecedented detail that's the dream behind the three billion project proposed late last decade a project that would not only map both surfaces of this double Planet system but hunt for signs of alien oceans either still present or long frozen interestingly the plan envisages not just an in-depth study of Pluto but also of Sharon while probably orbiting the larger object for three years Persephone would peel off the 30 separate flybys of this biggest of moons to give some context their number people are pretty damn excited about the upcoming juice missions swinging past Jupiter's moon Callisto just a dozen times 30 would be more than enough to do some serious groundbreaking research Norwood Sharon's role be regulated to just that of an object under observation in fact it's relatively large mass will be key to fulfilling the mission but trouble with sending a craft across the solar system to study multiple distant objects is that it needs to carry a hell of a lot of fuel to make all of those course adjustments fuel which adds weight which makes everything staggeringly expensive however this can be neatly solved by having a spare astronomical body with enough Mass to give you a gravity assist a body like say Sharon Persephone would get to the plutonian system using conventional fuel but then it would use Sharon's gravity to control its Further Adventures slingshotting around the moon in such a precise way that it could get to any point around Pluto not only oh would this allow the probe to examine much more of Pluto Sharon and even the smaller moons but it might also allow it to then go on to study other worlds the outer solar system you see is full of dwarf planets we know relatively little about Eris makamaka how mayor orcas quarrel the list really does go on as it stands there's not much interest in sending individual probes to explore them they're just too far away and too hard to get to but Anthony could get around this by using two final gravity assists from Sharon to fling itself out into the plutonian system and into the Kuiper belt with some added propulsion from our arm thrusters like those used on the dawn Mission series it should be able to get one extra visit in to go orbit yet another dwarf planet another dwarf planet that might house its own subsurface Ocean or maybe some other surprise that we currently can't even conceive of it used to be said that the Bible was The Greatest Story Ever Told if the Persephone Mission goes ahead though it will doubtless lay claim to that mantle imagine the first in-depth exploration of a double Planet system the first hunt for liquid water out in the Kuiper belt the first probe to ever visit multiple dwarf planets in a single Mission but before you start excitedly preparing your stash in advance of the Epic photo we need to inject a note of caution well two notes the first is a warning about the time scales involved originally Persephone was planned for a 20 2031 launch followed by a 27 year journey to Pluto and Sharon since it only took New Horizons nine years to cover the same distance you might be wondering if that's a bit of a typo but it's not New Horizons was only conducting a flyby zooming past the double Planet system at high speed before Vanishing off into the void Persephone by contrast is meant to orbit Pluto that means it has to be going much slower to be captured by the dwarf planet's weak gravity so slowly that the probe wasn't projected to get there until 2058 at that point I'll be old enough to be making videos about the top 10 retirement homes and that's just on Persephone's original schedule to make the 2031 launch the mission needed to be championed by the decade or surveyor once every 10 years overview of what the science Community thinks NASA should focus on the Persephone team's goal was to be included in the 2022 Edition as a high priority instead when the survey was published a return mission to Pluto and its twin was nowhere inside and that doesn't mean Persephone is necessarily dead a mask sample return mission was first suggested in 2003 but it didn't get selected by NASA until it was placed in the 2013 survey a plan to give Uranus a hard probing failed in 2013 but was championed by the 2022 Edition Persephone Maya get selected in 2033. unfortunately such a delay will push back the completion of the mission by another decade at least it could be the 2060s or even the 20s 70s before we finally get another close look at Pluto and Sharon as this video has hopefully shown Sharon alone is one of the most fascinating objects in our solar system a place that might hold the key to understanding so much about the objects and dwarf planets lurking in the Kuiper belt we can only hope that one day we're able to unlock these secrets that eventually Persephone or another mission like it will at last enter orbit around this strange and distant Moon and hopefully we will still be around to see what Marvels it discovers and just before you leave today thank you again to War Thunder for sponsoring today's video get a large free Bonus Pack if you register through my link below which includes multiple premium Vehicles premium account boosters and much more or go to WT play dot link forward slash Geographic's WT bonus and thanks for watching

Channel: Geographics

Views: 405,853

Keywords: charon pluto, pluto barycentre, charon nasa, pluto barycenter, charon, pluto nasa, pluto

Id: VEYxnoD4ABY

Length: 23min 26sec (1406 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 21 2022