Pluto's life partner, Charon, has a disarming red 'cap'. Ever since New Horizons snapped the moon's rust-tinted north pole on its 2015 flyby, scientists have pondered the planetary processes responsible for leaving such a bold landmark.
If it helps, just replace the word tholin with 'gunk'. The brownish-red mess of chemicals is like the residue left in the oven, if the oven used UV light to bake brownies made of simple gases like carbon dioxide or ammonia.
On Pluto, methane would be a likely starting place. To grow into a tholin, these tiny hydrocarbons would simply need to absorb aPluto's rosy glow has been the subject of study for decades. New Horizons simply revealed the precise patterning of tholins on its surface in glorious high definition.It was presumed methane shed from Pluto could drift across to its orbiting moon.
To determine what would really happen, SwRI researchers modeled the see-sawing motion of the largely tilted planet system. The secret to the smear, they found, might be the explosive nature of spring's arrival. The relatively sudden warming of the north pole would take place over several years – a mere blink in the moon's 248-year orbit of the Sun. During this brief period, a pall of methane frost just tens of microns thick would evaporate at one pole as it began to freeze over at the other.
Unfortunately, the modeling found this rapid movement would be far too quick for much of the frozen methane to absorb sufficient amounts of Lyman-alpha to become a tholin."Ethane is less volatile than methane and stays frozen to Charon's surface long after spring sunrise,"
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