• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Key Component Of Hair Bleach Found On Pluto’s Largest Moon

October 1, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Charon is the largest among the five peculiar moons of Pluto. It was studied briefly as NASA’s New Horizons flew by the system in 2015, a quick encounter that revealed a lot, including a dark patch on its Northern pole called the Mordor Macula. Planetary scientists have now conducted follow-up studies using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), discovering intriguing new facts about the surface chemistry of this distant moon.

Advertisement

When New Horizons studied Charon, its instruments detected water ice, ammonia-bearing substances, and even some organic compounds. This indicated the presence of interesting chemistry in a world that should be a frozen relic of the early Solar System. The spacecraft also spotted some bright ejecta surrounding craters on its surface, suggesting that material must have escaped from underground. Its composition remained unknown – until now.

JWST was able to conduct a deep infrared search of the surface of the distant moon and confirmed the presence of water and the other intriguing chemicals previously spotted by New Horizons. It also detected the presence of a veneer of carbon dioxide.

A plot showing the signal detected by both New horizons and JWST. Both instruments see the same elements in the same range, plus jwst show the presence of cabron dioxide and hyrdogen peroxide

There are a lot of interesting chemicals on Charon.

Image credit: Silvia Protopapa (SwRI), Ian Wong (STScl)

Researchers believe that the carbon dioxide comes from below the surface, in deposits that have existed for billions of years since Charon formed. They are now on the surface because they have been excavated by asteroid impacts, and the bright ejecta around the craters is believed to be just that.

If the thought of a carbonated interior to Charon (it’s not really carbonated… it’s dry ice) is not already amazing enough, the team has added to that the discovery of hydrogen peroxide. This chemical is commonly used for hair bleaching or as a disinfectant, and its presence on Charon indicates that there is some really interesting chemistry going on.



Advertisement

Hydrogen peroxide is a molecule similar to water, but with another atom of oxygen – it is H2O2. The presence of hydrogen peroxide suggests that the water ice on its surface is being transformed. The are many potential culprits: sunlight is dim that far away but it still has an impact; there is also the solar wind, the stream of electrically charged particles released by the Sun, slamming onto the surface of Charon; and galactic cosmic rays too will slap into the moon.

All in all, the research points at an intriguing world affected by Pluto, of course, but also by faraway phenomena. Other bodies in the Kuiper Belt, where Pluto and Charon reside, might also be affected in a similar way.

The study is published in Nature Communications.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Cricket-Manchester test likely to be postponed after India COVID-19 case
  2. EU to attend U.S. trade meeting put in doubt by French anger
  3. Soccer-West Ham win again, Leicester and Napoli falter
  4. Was Jesus A Hallucinogenic Mushroom? One Scholar Certainly Thought So

Source Link: Key Component Of Hair Bleach Found On Pluto’s Largest Moon

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • How Do We Predict The Weather? Find Out More In Issue 40 Of CURIOUS – Out Now
  • You Should Never Leave These Foods In Your Fridge Door (But We Bet You Do)
  • These Gullies On Mars Look Carved – We Might Finally Know What Created Them
  • Potential Environmental Trigger For Autism Identified, 3I/ATLAS’s Tail Appears To Have Changed Direction, And Much More This Week
  • Spaghetti Has Inner Secrets We’re Only Just Learning About
  • How Far Back In Time Could You Go And Still Understand English?
  • We Now Know How The First People Reached America – And It Wasn’t On Foot
  • Two Major Coral Species Now Functionally Extinct In Florida Keys, After Record-Breaking Marine Heatwave
  • A “Super-Earth” In The Habitable Zone Is Half The Distance To Comparable Worlds
  • Adorable But Critically Endangered Bornean Orangutan Born In Conservation Success
  • How Did The FDA Settle On The “2,000 Calories Per Day” Guideline?
  • Comet 3I/ATLAS Losing At Least Two Kangaroos’ Worth Of Dust Every Second
  • Mummified Dinosaur Duo Prove They Had Hooves, Marking “The First Confirmed Hooved Reptile”
  • What Do The Numbers On Your Toaster Really Mean?
  • NASA Vs. Elon Musk: Is A Moon Landing This Decade Off The Cards?
  • Scientists Explored Some Of The Deepest Parts Of The Ocean And Spotted Some Seriously Weird Deep-Sea Creatures
  • 500-Meter-Tall Megatsunami Struck Remote Alaskan Fjord After Massive Landslide
  • 3I/ATLAS, CKM Syndrome, And Mosquitoes’ Final Frontier
  • Male Humpback Dolphins Spotted Wearing Sea Sponge “Wigs” To Woo The Ladies
  • Can’t Sleep? The Military Sleep Trick That Helps You Fall Asleep in Just 2 Minutes
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version