The mystery of how Pluto got a giant heart-shaped feature on its surface has finally been solved by an international team of astrophysicists. The team is the first to successfully reproduce the unusual shape with numerical simulations, attributing it to a giant and slow oblique-angle impact.
The mystery of how Pluto got a giant heart-shaped feature on its surface has finally been solved by an international team of astrophysicists led by the University of Bern and members of the National Center of Competence in Research PlanetS. The team is the first to successfully reproduce the unusual shape with numerical simulations, attributing it to a giant and slow oblique-angle impact.
"Pluto's core is so cold that the rocks remained very hard and did not melt despite the heat of the impact, and thanks to the angle of impact and the low velocity, the core of the impactor did not sink into Pluto's core, but remained intact as a splat on it," explains Harry Ballantyne."Somewhere beneath Sputnik is the remnant core of another massive body, that Pluto never quite digested," adds co-author Erik Asphaug from the University of Arizona.
An international team of researchers with NASA's InSight mission located four new craters created by impacts on the surface of Mars. Using data from a seismometer and visuals acquired from the Mars ...
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