MULTIMEDIA: PLANETARY ART

The First Kuiper Belt Object

The image to the right shows the discovery of the fist Kuiper Belt Object (KBO). After examining short period comets for many years, scientists in the '80's became convinced that there was a cloud of small icy bodies out past the orbit of Neptune. This is when the search began to find these bodies.

The object to the right was found in 1992. Its name is 1992QB1, and it is the first of now hundreds of discovered Kuiper Belt Objects.

This image shows 4 frames in time. The arrow is pointing at the very faint and distant KBO. Notice that in each frame, the object moves slowly across the frame. Scientists can look at how slowly the object moves and how bright it looks to get a good estimate on its size and distance. So when they saw something faint moving slowly across the image, they knew that they had found what they were looking for!

New Horizons in the Kuiper Belt

This is an artist's conception of what things will look like once New Horizons has passed Pluto and entered the Kuiper Belt. At this distance, the sun is barely anything more than just a very bright star in the sky. Out at this distance, everything is cold and dark.

But this is where New Horizons will hopefully be in 2020, giving us new insights from inside the Kuiper Belt and helping us discover a large number of new KBOs!

Kuiper Belt Diagram

This image shows a rough schematic of the size and location of the Kuiper Belt. Notice how it starts just a little outside the orbit of Neptune. This means that Pluto is inside the belt! In fact, if Pluto had been discovered today instead of back in the 1920's, it probably would have been classified as a KBO instead of a planet!

We can also see from this image that the Kuiper Belt extends out a long way. If you thought the Solar System ended with the planets, think again! Out past Neptune and Pluto are plenty of these KBOs! And out past them is something called the Oort Cloud, but that's a different story altogether!

New Horizons at Pluto

So what does Pluto and its moon Charon look like? We don't really know as no spacecraft has ever visited either of them. But this piece of art - comissioned for the New Horizons Project - shows what it may look like. Far off in ther distance, the Sun gives only a small fraction of the heat and light that we get here on Earth. We can see a wispy atmosphere hanging over the methane-frosted surface of Pluto. Charon hangs in the distance, looking just as cold and desolate as Pluto.

Is this what Pluto looks like? We don't know. But hopefully by 2015 we will!

Pluto Brightness

While the above image may have been a great conception, this is all we have to go off so far. This image is a brightness map of the surface of Pluto. The light and dark areas denote nothing more than that: Light and dark. You may ask, "If you can see light and dark this well, how come you don't have actual pictures of what it looks like?" The answer to that lies in how these images were created.

This image was taken back in 1994 with the Hubble Space Telescope. Given how small and far away Pluto is, this is about the best the HST can do. The two small images in the upper-left are what hublle actually saw. Not very good and pretty hard to see. The two larger images are extrapolations using computers. So we can see that the images Hubble itself took aren't that great, but using computers, we can get a little better idea of the brigtness of Pluto's surface.

Pluto's Dark Streak

This odd image shows a little higher detail about the surface of Pluto. In addition, this image is in true color, thus giving us a little taste of what Pluto actually looks like! But what is that odd dark marking just south of the equator? Scientists aren't really sure. It could be methane deposits or it could be some sort of surface feature. We do know, however, that whatever it is, it's a pretty striking surface feature. If you look, you can see that there is a really bright region near the upper-right. Scientists aren't really sure what that is either, but we're hoping that New Horizons can give us a better look!

Pluto and Charon

The Hubble Space Telescope can see some pretty impressive things, and this is what it sees when we turn it to look at Pluto! The big, fuzzy ball in the lower-left is Pluto, while the accompanying ball in the upper-right is Charon.

While it is pretty cool that the HST can resolve these two objects into spheres, it's a little disappointing that this is as good a view as it gets. This is the reason New Horizons is going to travel out to Pluto, to get a better look than this so that we can actually see what Pluto looks like!

The Size of Pluto

All the other images of Pluto here just show sort of what it looks like. But how big is Pluto? Well, this image shows a comparison in size of a few celestial objects. On the left is the Earth, our home. In the lower-right is the moon, giving us a good comparison in how much larger the Earth is than the moon. But above the moon is what's really interesting. Here we see a representation of how large Pluto is... and it's pretty interesting. As you can see, Pluto is smaller than the Moon, and much smaller than Earth! The Ninth Planet from the Sun is quite small, but it's still a planet.

Above Pluto in this image is an object known as 2004DW. This is one of the hundreds of Kuiper Belt Objects known. 2004DW is one of the larger ones, but you can see from the image that its still smaller than Pluto. It was put in this image just as an interesting comparison.

Surface Map of Pluto

This is essentially the same thing as the Pluto Brightness image, but here we see it laid out in geographic coordinates. Note the bright areas near both poles. Scientists aren't relly quite sure exactly what we're looking at here that's so bright and dark, but scientists guess that the surface of Pluto is made of Nitrogen and Methane. It has to be very cold indeed for these substances to freeze; probably less than 70 Kelvin!