Armed with the immeasurable observational power of James Webb’s Space Telescope (JWST), scientists have detected faint traces of fluorescent bloating leaking from the dwarf planet Makemake, hiding outside the solar system. This is the second time gas has been detected on an object far from Earth, suggesting that this little world is much more active than we once thought.
Makemake is an almost sphere object, approximately 890 miles (1,430 km) long, less than half the diameter of the moon. In an area known as the Cuiper Belt, it is located about 45 times more than Earth, on average, about 45 times more than Earth. It is a ring of asteroids that crosses the orbits of asteroids, comets, and UTO. Discovered in 2005, there is a small moon called the MK2, which is about 110 miles (175 km) in diameter.
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Scientists have long known that the reddish brown surface of Makemake is covered with a layer of methane and ethane ice, but believes that small pellets of these chemicals, about half an inch (1 cm) in diameter, can be found on cold surfaces, according to NASA.
However, in a new study uploaded to the preprint server ARXIV on September 8th and embraced future publication in the letters of the Astrophysics Journal, researchers use JWST to examine Makemake in detail, finding that planetary stars also have a faint concentration of methane gas surrounding their ice surface.
“The Webb Telescope revealed that methane exists in both the methane and the superficial vapor phase, a discovery that makes Makemake even more attractive,” said Silvia Protopapa, a researcher at the University of Maryland and the Institute at Southwest Texas, in a statement. “That shows that Makemake is not an inactive remnant of the outer solar system, but rather a dynamic body where methane ice is still evolving.”
To date, the other transneptune object (over-neptune object) known to produce its own gas is Plput, a very thin atmosphere made up primarily of nitrogen and low in methane and carbon monoxide, reported by Live Science’s sister site Space.com. The dwarf planet Ceres, located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, also has a faint atmosphere made up of water vapor.
JWST found methane thanks to a phenomenon known as “solar absorption fluorescence.” Using the telescope’s advanced infrared equipment, the team also measured the gas temperature. This is a frigid minus 387 degrees Fahrenheit (233 degrees Celsius).
However, researchers are not sure exactly where methane came from or whether it is permanently trapped within Makemake.
One possible explanation is that methane ice on the surface of dwarf planets is a solid-to-gas transition, contained within the atmosphere of fragile supersin such as Plput and Ceres. However, in this case, new data suggest that the pressure in this gas layer must be more than a billion times weaker than the Earth’s atmosphere and more than a million times weaker than Plput, making it difficult to see if it exists.
Another possible explanation is that gas is being ejected from beneath the ice-like surface of the object, like Enceladus on the frozen sea moon of Saturn. This potential process, known as outgassing, can occur in various locations across dwarf planets, with methane popping outwards as “hundreds of kilograms per second,” Protopapa said. However, it is also very difficult to determine whether this applies to the available data.
Researchers hope that follow-up observations by JWST will help solve this puzzle. But regardless of where methane came from, new discoveries “challenge the challenge of Makemean’s traditional view as a stationary frozen body,” the researchers wrote in their paper.
Earlier this year, another group of researchers using JWST revealed that another distant dwarf planet named Makemake and Ellis is geologically active and potentially at a point where they may support their lives. (Currently there are no planned missions to investigate any of the far-flung dwarf planets.)
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