Hubble sees Pluto changing color, ice sheet cover

[n2doc]

By SETH BORENSTEIN
AP Science Writer


WASHINGTON (AP) -- Spurned Pluto is changing its looks, donning more rouge in its complexion and altering its iceball surface here and there.

Color astronomers surprised.

Newly released Hubble Space Telescope photos show the distant one-time planet - demoted to "dwarf planet" status in 2006 - is changing color and its ice sheets are shifting.

The photos, released by NASA Thursday, paint a Pluto that is significantly redder than it had been for the past several decades. To the layman, it has a yellow-orange hue, but astronomers say it has about 20 percent more red than it used to have.

The pictures show icy frozen nitrogen on Pluto's surface growing and shrinking, brightening in the north and darkening in the south. Astronomers say Pluto's surface is changing more than the surfaces of other bodies in the solar system. That's unexpected because a season lasts 120 years in some regions of Pluto.

more
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_SCI_PLUTO

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/pluto-20100204.html

[thereismore]

1. Nice! nt

[Sherman A1]

2. I support the PLANET Pluto

:patriot: and I hope others will join me.

[Wilms]

4. .

[Fumesucker]

3. This is interesting..

The Hubble images are a few pixels wide. But through a technique called dithering, multiple, slightly offset pictures can be combined through computer-image processing to synthesize a higher-resolution view than could be seen in a single exposure. "This has taken four years and 20 computers operating continuously and simultaneously to accomplish," says Buie, who developed special algorithms to sharpen the Hubble data.

[gtar100]

5. Trust the experts - to a layman it's yellow-orange; but the experts say it's red.

:rofl: Silly humans, it's red.