Skip to main content

Pluto has a beating heart of frozen nitrogen. Here’s why

The dwarf planet Pluto is known for its big heart — a structure of nitrogen ice on its surface called Tombaugh Regio which is shaped like a heart. With a left lobe consisting of a 620 mile-wide ice sheet and a right lobe consisting of nitrogen glaciers, Tombaugh Regio holds most of the planet’s nitrogen ice. But this heart isn’t static, as a new study has suggested this structure is central to the planet’s atmospheric circulation.

A high-resolution image of Pluto taken by New Horizons on July 14, 2015. The image has been color-enhanced to show the different geological features of the surface. NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute.

Most of Pluto’s thin atmosphere is composed of nitrogen gas, but there is also frozen nitrogen on the surface. When this frozen nitrogen is hit by the sun’s rays, some of it turns into vapor and rises into the atmosphere. At night, it cools and condenses back into ice. The rising and falling of the nitrogen acts as a heartbeat for the atmosphere, circulating gases in the opposite direction to the planet’s spin.

“This highlights the fact that Pluto’s atmosphere and winds — even if the density of the atmosphere is very low — can impact the surface,” lead author Tanguy Bertrand, an astrophysicist and planetary scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, explained in a statement. “Before New Horizons, everyone thought Pluto was going to be a netball — completely flat, almost no diversity. But it’s completely different. It has a lot of different landscapes and we are trying to understand what’s going on there.”

Using computer modeling, Bertrand and colleagues found the presence of Tombaugh Regio triggers westward winds, with a distinct current running along the western boundary of the Sputnik Planitia basin. The structures of the planet’s surface have distinct effects on its atmosphere and give rise to atmospheric movements that are unique in the solar system. “Sputnik Planitia may be as important for Pluto’s climate as the ocean is for Earth’s climate,” Bertrand explained. “If you remove Sputnik Planitia — if you remove the heart of Pluto — you won’t have the same circulation.”

“Pluto has some mystery for everybody,” Bertrand said.

The findings are published in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

Editors' Recommendations

Georgina Torbet
Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…
Eruption of ice volcano threw liquid water over the frozen surface of Pluto
new horizons spacecraft pluto2

Liquid water could once have existed on the frozen surface of Pluto, put there by the violent eruption of a cryovolcano, according to a new study.

“This was a huge surprise to all of us about Pluto,” planetary scientist Dale Cruikshank of the NASA Ames Research Center and an author of the paper told Science News. “It means there are lots of surprises waiting to be uncovered in that part of the solar system.”

Read more
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more