2023-12-01 12:35:08
A depiction of Eris’ rock core and ice cap on a NASA illustrated background. -NASA
MADRID, 1 Dic. (EUROPA PRESS) –
New data obtained on the internal structure of the dwarf planet Eris from the relationship with his moon, Dysnomiahave revealed that it is a body similar to a soft cheese.
Eris is about the size of Pluto but is about 50% farther from the sun. The discovery of Eris in the Kuiper belt beyond Neptune in 2005 sparked the debate that ultimately reclassified Pluto as a dwarf planet.
The new research, published in Science Advances by University of California Santa Cruz planetary sciences professor Francis Nimmo, part of the evidence that Eris and its moon They always look at each other the same way.
“This happens because the large planet is affected by the tides generated by the small moon,” explained Nimmo. it’s a statement. “The larger the moon, the faster the planet rotates.”
Researchers can use the spin and orbital characteristics of planets and their moons to infer properties of their internal structures. But until recently, scientists didn’t have an estimate of Dysnomia’s size.
Models developed by Nimmo with data from one of Eris’s discoverers, Michael Brown of Caltech, revealed that Eris’s moon must be less than a certain mass. This upper mass limit provided the second crucial piece of information.
“And as soon as you know that, you can start doing real calculations,” Nimmo said. The main and unexpected result of the Nimmo and Brown model is that Eris It is surprisingly dissipative or “soft.”
The co-authors determined that Eris has a rocky core surrounded by a shell of ice. This outer layer of ice is likely convective, unlike Pluto’s conductive layer.
“The rock contains radioactive elements that produce heat. And then that heat has to come out somehow“Nimmo explained. “Then, as the heat escapes, it causes a slow churning of the ice.”
Therefore, Eris behaves less like a rigid object and “more like a soft cheese or something. It has a tendency to flow a little“Nimmo said.
The upper limit on Dysnomia’s mass came from measurements made by the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) radio telescope. Nimmo hopes that more accurate mass measurements will soon help refine the model even further.
“If Dysnomia is smaller than that, then Eris is even softer,” he said. Additional data on the shape of Eris will help verify the model created by Nimmo and Brown.
“We emphasize that Eris should be quite soft because if there is any topography on the surface, the ice will flow and that topography will disappear” Nimmo said. “So it would be good to get some measurements of the shape that Eris has because if it’s very irregular, it wouldn’t agree with our model.”
Eris is so far from Earth that it appears as a single pixel, so to reconstruct its shape, scientists will need to watch the planet pass in front of the stars.
“The star blinks and then comes back, and that tells you how wide Eris is at that point. And if you do that with a bunch of stars, then you can reconstruct the shape,” Nimmo explained. “I hope people are really doing it, but I don’t know if they are.”
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