Starship Asterisk*

BMAONE23 wrote:Wave action though is caused by the interaction between the gravity of the Sun and Moon, by the constantly changing location of the Moon over the Earth's surface and by wind action on the water surface. Pluto has no appreciable atmosphere and no surface liquid (at least given it's current orbital location) so mechanism 3, surface wind, won't cause wave action. Charon and Pluto always present the same face to each other. If you stood on Pluto and looked up at Charon, it would never change it's location in the sky. So the area of greatest tidal influence never changes on Pluto. This negates the second mechanism for the creation of wave action. As to the first, the relative effect of gravitational interactions between the Sun and Charon on potential liquids on Pluto. This works well on Earth because the moon orbits earth on a relatively similar plane to Earth's solar orbital plane. Currently the Pluto/Caron orbital plane is rotated almost 90deg from the solar orbital plane and alters the tidal dynamic. Though in about 60 years or so Pluto/Charon will return to a similar orbital dynamic to that of Earth & Luna.

Tides and wave action would be an extremely difficult, short lived, and unlikely source of energy on Pluto

workgazer wrote:So is water on earth insignificant, I think the question is anwsered very well in this excert.

Scientists calculate that the total mass of the oceans on Earth is 1.35 x 1018 metric tonnes, which is 1/4400 the total mass of the Earth. In other words, while the oceans cover 71% of the Earth’s surface, they only account for 0.02% of our planet’s total mass.
The link, full article
http://www.universetoday.com/65588/what ... -is-water/

I am an accountant by trade and i am fairly certain .02% of any of my numbers is ignorable, in fact i could lose that at stock take and no one would notice.

however i do except that 135000000000000000000 tonnes is a big numer and one hell of a swimming pool.

Chris Peterson wrote:

Alohascope wrote:Ah .. here's one .. please excuse the advertisement .. the animation is worth the wait. It not only shows how rough the gravitational 'tides' are, but shows how Pluto's own motion is very rough, seemingly rough enough to rough up its ocean.

http://www.space.com/31071-plutos-moons ... izons.html

Not sure what you're taking from that. Pluto's outer moons have almost no tidal effect on Pluto or Charon.

Alohascope wrote:

Chris Peterson wrote:Not sure what you're taking from that. Pluto's outer moons have almost no tidal effect on Pluto or Charon.

"Almost" is the key word here, Chris. How much "almost" does it take to set up tides in Pluto's ocean? On earth the highest tide is not the 16.3 meter Bay of Fundy tide but the Burntcoat tide in Canada's Arctic of 17 meters .. 55 feet is not insignificant, and earth has one moon while Pluto has five .. five moons plus Pluto orbiting in a way destribed as "pandemonium" by some scientists. Pandemonium creates stress, does it not?

Chris Peterson wrote:

Alohascope wrote:

Chris Peterson wrote:Not sure what you're taking from that. Pluto's outer moons have almost no tidal effect on Pluto or Charon.

"Almost" is the key word here, Chris. How much "almost" does it take to set up tides in Pluto's ocean? On earth the highest tide is not the 16.3 meter Bay of Fundy tide but the Burntcoat tide in Canada's Arctic of 17 meters .. 55 feet is not insignificant, and earth has one moon while Pluto has five .. five moons plus Pluto orbiting in a way destribed as "pandemonium" by some scientists. Pandemonium creates stress, does it not?

No, pandemonium does not create stress. The orbital and rotational dynamics of the system are complex. That does not mean the tidal forces are. Consider the tidal force of Nix on Pluto. It is about 9e11 N. For reference, that's 10 million times smaller than the tidal force of the Moon on Earth. Scale that to Pluto and the tidal force of Nix is enough to raise a tide one or two micrometers high given complex underwater topography, or a fraction of a micrometer given a smooth ocean floor.

ALohascope wrote:Then again: when you watch that animation of the system long enough you see the moons lining up on one side of Pluto or the other .. that would create a lot more pull than Nix alone.

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/10520 ... -moons.htm

A suggestion: editing capability for guests .. I'd have to make fewer posts. Or maybe I just can't see the 'edit' button.

ALohascope wrote:Then again: when you watch that animation of the system long enough you see the moons lining up on one side of Pluto or the other .. that would create a lot more pull than Nix alone.

ALohascope wrote:A suggestion: editing capability for guests .. I'd have to make fewer posts. Or maybe I just can't see the 'edit' button.

Wikipedia wrote:

A terrestrial planet, telluric planet or rocky planet is a planet that is composed primarily of silicate rocks or metals. Within the Solar System, the terrestrial planets are the inner planets closest to the Sun, i.e. Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars.
...
Terrestrial planets have a solid planetary surface, making them substantially different from the larger giant planets, which are composed mostly of some combination of hydrogen, helium, and water existing in various physical states.

Ann wrote:Alohascope, excuse me, but what are you up to really? You are posting like crazy here, and you have made more than one crazy claim, too. For example, you said that the Earth is not a rocky planet. The slightest googling effort would have told you otherwise.

Wikipedia wrote:

A terrestrial planet, telluric planet or rocky planet is a planet that is composed primarily of silicate rocks or metals. Within the Solar System, the terrestrial planets are the inner planets closest to the Sun, i.e. Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars.
...
Terrestrial planets have a solid planetary surface, making them substantially different from the larger giant planets, which are composed mostly of some combination of hydrogen, helium, and water existing in various physical states.

Click to view full size image

Here is a picture of the structure of the Earth. The picture was made at the University of Leeds.

Further googling will get you to one hit after another about Earth as a rocky or terrestrial planet.

So once again, Alohascope, what are you up to? You make no attempt whatsoever to really try to find out if your hypotheses are correct. You listen to no one. People can throw a ton of evidence at you, and you just shrug it off. In my opinion you are not interested in the universe or the solar system at all, just in your own fantasies about them. That sounds harsh, but I'm afraid I mean it. Perhaps you will change in the future, so that you become a valuable member of these boards. But for now, I don't think you belong here.

Ann

Ann wrote:Alohascope, excuse me, but what are you up to really? You are posting like crazy here, and you have made more than one crazy claim, too. For example, you said that the Earth is not a rocky planet. The slightest googling effort would have told you otherwise.

Wikipedia wrote:

A terrestrial planet, telluric planet or rocky planet is a planet that is composed primarily of silicate rocks or metals. Within the Solar System, the terrestrial planets are the inner planets closest to the Sun, i.e. Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars.
...
Terrestrial planets have a solid planetary surface, making them substantially different from the larger giant planets, which are composed mostly of some combination of hydrogen, helium, and water existing in various physical states.

Click to view full size image

Here is a picture of the structure of the Earth. The picture was made at the University of Leeds.

Further googling will get you to one hit after another about Earth as a rocky or terrestrial planet.

So once again, Alohascope, what are you up to? You make no attempt whatsoever to really try to find out if your hypotheses are correct. You listen to no one. People can throw a ton of evidence at you, and you just shrug it off. In my opinion you are not interested in the universe or the solar system at all, just in your own fantasies about them. That sounds harsh, but I'm afraid I mean it. Perhaps you will change in the future, so that you become a valuable member of these boards. But for now, I don't think you belong here.

Ann

Chris Peterson wrote:

ALohascope wrote:Then again: when you watch that animation of the system long enough you see the moons lining up on one side of Pluto or the other .. that would create a lot more pull than Nix alone.

No. The animation is telling us nothing about tides. Tidally, the Pluto system is basically two bodies: Pluto and Charon. There is a very strong tidal force between the two, but since they're tidally locked in a low eccentricity orbit around each other, that tide doesn't do much work. Nix and Hydra are the only other two bodies that could produce a barely detectable tide, but that tidal force is extremely small- not enough to distort Pluto or Charon to any degree, not enough to move material, even liquid if it exists. Styx and Kerberos would have no tidal effect at all.

You see patterns in the orbits because of the complex resonances that exist. Even a perfect syzygy condition, however, would not produce any significant tidal forces. Whatever is going on with Pluto's geology, tides are almost certainly not a factor.

Alohascope wrote:
Ann your illustration does not contain a date, however, at this date in history that illustration may still hold considerable power of persuasion. But, as more and more water IN earth is discovered a new model will be made as rock is of course generally denser than water .. although some rock actually floats on water, and it is possible that kind of rock will be found along with the water. What is another of my "crazy claims?"

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/12211538-pluto-updates-from-agu.html wrote: Pluto updates from AGU and DPS:
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla, 2015/12/21

<<There is a huge variety of types of surfaces on Pluto. That variety relates, in part, to a variety in surface materials on Pluto. The main materials on Pluto are water ice, carbon monoxide ice, nitrogen ice, methane ice, and tholins. At the poster session, I asked geophysicist Bill McKinnon about the properties of these ices. He explained that at the 40-kelvin temperatures that prevail on Pluto, water ice is as strong and solid as rock is on Earth, but the other ices are weaker. Nitrogen and carbon monoxide ices will act very similarly on the surface (and are miscible in each other). The main difference between nitrogen and carbon monoxide on Pluto is that nitrogen is more volatile, and will turn to vapor when heated more quickly than carbon monoxide will. Both have much less strength than water ice, so should flow more readily, much as glacial ice does on Earth. Note that even though they can flow, they are still solid, and the flow we're talking about is relatively slow, in the neighborhood of several centimeters per year. Methane ice can mix into nitrogen and carbon monoxide ices as well, it's less volatile, and may be more rigid. Nitrogen and carbon monoxide ices are both denser than water ice at 40 kelvins, while methane has only half the density of water ice. Tholins are organic solids produced when solar radiation bombards these ices, and are likely the agent that produces reddish stains in various places on Pluto.>>

MarkBour wrote:I'm having trouble finding any references that spell this out for me. I believe that methane ice, like water ice, is less dense than the liquid phase (depending on what exactly the methane ice is composed of, because I think they mean methane and water combinations). But I would guess that carbon monoxide ice and nitrogen ice do not share this happy property ... that instead, the solid phases are more dense than the liquid phases. Not sure how that affects flows of these substances, but it might cause somewhat different dynamics than with water ice flow.

sallyseaver wrote:
I did a little searching for you and found this article from August 1970: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF00628321. It says that "The linear-expansion coefficient calculated from these data is found to have a maximum at 19.8 K, .... A negative expansion coefficient has been observed below 8 K." Another peer-reviewed article puts the negative thermal expansion property of methane happening at 8.7 K [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1 ... 3/abstract]. But there is nothing to suggest that their research is done under the kind of low pressure associated with Pluto. Pressure matters.

• High pressure (i.e., >100MPa ~ 1000 atmospheres) matters but low pressure probably doesn't.

http://www1.lsbu.ac.uk/water/water_density.html wrote: Water Density by Martin Chaplin

[b][size=115]The density of liquid & solid water along the liquid-solid phase line.[/size][/b]

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Hexagonal ice is less dense than liquid water whereas the other ices found in equilibrium with water are all denser with phase changes occurring on the approach of the liquid and solid densities.

Orange = amorphous ice.

Blue = crystalline ice.

Ice III = A tetragonal crystalline ice, formed by cooling water down to 250 K at 300 MPa.

sallyseaver wrote:
Okay, I get your point about phase transitions for water and high pressure. But we were discussing methane. I just don't know for certain that the results published for methane at one bar (Earth's atmospheric pressure) translate to methane on Pluto where the pressure is 5 orders of magnitude less.

sallyseaver wrote: ... (see above) ...
Does this help your thinking?
Kudos to you for thinking about how negative thermal expansion might be influencing the surface of Pluto.

MarkBour wrote:
Any idea about liquid methane sloshing around under a skin of solid methane sounded unlikely to me.

• Slosh, verb [probably blend of slop & slush] : to cause (a liquid) to move in a noisy or messy way

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/x-marks-a-curious-corner-on-pluto-s-icy-plains/ wrote:

[b][color=#FF0000][size=110]Transmitted to Earth on Dec. 24, 2015, this image from the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) extends New Horizons’ highest-resolution swath of Pluto to the center of Sputnik Planum, the informally named plain that forms the left side of Pluto’s “heart.” Mission scientists believe the pattern of the cells stems from the slow thermal convection of the nitrogen-dominated ices. The darker patch at the center of the image is likely a dirty block of water ice “floating” in denser solid nitrogen, and which has been dragged to the edge of a convection cell. Also visible are thousands of pits in the surface, which scientists believe may form by sublimation.[/size][/color][/b]

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‘X’ Marks a Curious Corner on Pluto’s Icy Plains
Jan. 7, 2016: Bill Keeter

<<“X” marks the spot of some intriguing surface activity in the latest picture of Pluto returned from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft. “This part of Pluto is acting like a lava lamp, if you can imagine a lava lamp as wide as, and even deeper than, the Hudson Bay.” - William McKinnon, deputy lead of the New Horizons Geology Team.

Sputnik Planum is at a lower elevation than most of the surrounding area by a couple of miles, but is not completely flat. Its surface is separated into cells or polygons 16 to 40 kilometers wide, and when viewed at low sun angles (with visible shadows), the cells are seen to have slightly raised centers and ridged margins, with about 100 meters of overall height variation.

Mission scientists believe the pattern of the cells stems from the slow thermal convection of the nitrogen-dominated ices that fill Sputnik Planum. A reservoir that’s likely several miles or kilometers deep in some places, the solid nitrogen is warmed at depth by Pluto’s modest internal heat, becomes buoyant and rises up in great blobs, and then cools off and sinks again to renew the cycle.

“This part of Pluto is acting like a lava lamp,” said William McKinnon, deputy lead of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team, from Washington University in St. Louis, “if you can imagine a lava lamp as wide as, and even deeper than, the Hudson Bay.”

Computer models by the New Horizons team show that these blobs of overturning solid nitrogen can slowly evolve and merge over millions of years. The ridged margins, which mark where cooled nitrogen ice sinks back down, can be pinched off and abandoned. The “X” feature is likely one of these—a former quadruple junction where four convection cells meet. Numerous, active triple junctions can be seen elsewhere in the LORRI mosaic.>>