Model Suggests Pluto Boasts Massive Ocean

Aww, the cute little dwarf planet thinks it's just like a grown-up planet.

While we won't know for certain until 2015, planetary scientists are now speculating that Pluto, the former planet, could be hiding an ocean underneath its icy surface. NASA's New Horizon probe is expected to cruise by the non-planet four years from now, when it will take detailed information of Pluto's physical characteristics. Chief among those could be an ocean concealed by a shell of frozen nitrogen and a layer of frozen water. Guillaume Robuchon and Francis Nimmo, researchers at the University of California at Santa Cruz, created a computer model to see if such an ocean is possible. Via PhysOrg:

The pair modeled the thermal evolution of the dwarf planet and studied the behavior of the shell to see how the surface would be affected by the presence of an ocean below.

Ironically, the easiest feature to identify would appear if no ocean existed.

As spherical bodies spin, their angular momentum tends to push material towards the equator, forming a bulge. If Pluto boasts a liquid layer, the ice would flow, reducing such a protrusion. Thus, the appearance of a “frozen-in” primordial bulge, left over from when Pluto spun more rapidly, would signify a lack of ocean.

The New Horizons probe hopes to determine if such a bulge does exist. Further, if there is an ocean, the icy shell should contain fractures across the surface, much like those that have been recently discovered on Jupiter's moon Europa. The duo says its model indicated if Pluto has an ocean, it would likely span the entire dwarf planet and have an average depth of 165 kilometres. It would also mark the furthest away destination in our solar system to boast water.