Scientist Look Into The Varying Brightness Of Pluto's Haze

The New Horizons mission team from NASA is currently learning more about Pluto, its structure, behavior, complex atmosphere, and haze layers. First discovered in July, these layers are found to be extensive, with its nitrogen atmosphere varying in brightness.

According to NASA, the haze maintains a vertical structure. The waves' brightness may vary depending on its illumination or viewpoint. This may or may not be due to buoyancy or gravity waves that typically appears, depending on the flow of air on the mountain ranges that is known also to occur on Earth and Mars.

The blue haze layers can be best seen with the images taken with the sun behind the icy planet. A series of these backlit images were taken by the New Horizons Spacecraft on July 14, 2015, and the haze layers were seen to have varied by about 30 percent, although the height remains the same.

Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory Investigator Andy Cheng said that the structure of the haze is a new clue regarding the nature of Pluto. The fact that the hazes don't move up or down means in itself that it will be important in the modeling efforts for the planet.

There have been other theories regarding the haze. In March, Mashable reported that the icy planet may once have been covered with liquid nitrogen. Unfortunately, today, it is already too cold for any liquid nitrogen to still exist. Due to the variations of Pluto's orbit, however, it is possible that in the past, it had enough atmospheric pressure to increase its average temperature to a point where liquid nitrogen can exist on its surface.

Today, frozen nitrogen can be found on the glaciers of Pluto and is unofficially named the Sputnik Planum region. You may have seen it as well; it is located at in the heart-shaped feature on the surface.