A backlit Pluto reveals the extent of the planet's atmosphere

Image Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI (7)

Also, the existence of the sizeable moon Charon strongly indicates a major collision between Pluto and another celestial body in the distant past.  This collision may have placed Pluto into its eccentric orbit, or perhaps the same major external influence (a Dark Star way beyond Neptune? (8)) which perturbed Sedna so dramatically? 

Pluto has many more surprises up its sleeve, all of which point to a dramatic past.  I think that its claim to be a proper planet has been greatly enhanced.

"Other photos taken from a million miles away revealed evidence of cliffs, craters and chasms larger than the Earth's Grand Canyon.  Pluto looks and behaves like a fully fledged planet, having an atmosphere and no less than five moons of its own.  The dwarf planet is somewhat larger than previously thought, having a diameter of 1,473 miles.  The result confirms that Pluto is larger than any other known solar system object beyond the orbit of Neptune." (2)

Its curious surface features include a bright, prominent 'heart' (1) and various areas which appear to have been substantially re-worked over time, suggestive of interior geophysical processes in play:

"The image shows for the first time that some surfaces on Pluto are peppered with impact craters and are therefore relatively ancient, perhaps several billion years old.  Other regions, such as the interior of the heart, show no obvious craters and thus are probably younger, indicating that Pluto has experienced a long and complex geological history. Some craters appear partially destroyed, perhaps by erosion. There are also hints that parts of Pluto’s crust have been fractured, as indicated by the series of linear features to the left of the heart." (1)

There have also been hints of a sub-surface ocean.  Pluto's companion Charon is relatively large for a moon - even more so than the Moon's relative size to the Earth (both might be consider binary planets).  It likely formed following a catastrophic collision between Pluto and another cosmic body.  This process served to heat Pluto's interior, enabling a liquid ocean to exist possibly to the current day (9).  Such an ocean is likely to lie ~60 miles below the surface, however, and contain ammonia and salt impurities driving down its freezing point (10).

For both bodies, their mutual tidal heating likely continues to drive internal heating mechanisms, helping to explain the extent of re-surfacing over ancient craters across the landscapes of both Pluto and Charon, including Pluto's now famous 'heart'.  Charon's orbit around Pluto was likely more eccentric in the past, exacerbating the effect of tidal friction in the past.  The following geophysical prediction from 2014 appears to be bearing fruit:

"If New Horizons finds evidence of ancient tidally-driven tectonic activity on either body, the most likely explanation is that Pluto had an internal ocean during Charon’s orbital evolution." (11)

NASA's data from New Horizons does seem to confirm this for Charon:

"A swath of cliffs and troughs stretches about 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) from left to right, suggesting widespread fracturing of Charon’s crust, likely a result of internal processes. At upper right, along the moon’s curving edge, is a canyon estimated to be 4 to 6 miles (7 to 9 kilometers) deep." (12)

Pluto's varied surface includes dramatic mountains, likely consisting of water ice, whose composition at Pluto's extreme temperature ranges creates a much stronger building material than methane/nitrogen ice.  These are youthful mountains likely formed in the last 100 million years - an estimate based upon a surprising lack of craters in their vicinity:

"“This is one of the youngest surfaces we’ve ever seen in the solar system,” says Moore. Unlike the icy moons of giant planets, Pluto cannot be heated by gravitational interactions with a much larger planetary body. Some other process must be generating the mountainous landscape. “This may cause us to rethink what powers geological activity on many other icy worlds,” says GGI [Geology, Geophysics and Imaging] deputy team leader John Spencer of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo." (13)

So, the ice mountains likely arose from the water-ice bedrock below Pluto's surface, a layer which itself may cover a deeper aqueous ocean.  Other areas of Pluto are covered in wide fields of glaciers flowing across the planet's surface.  The intense cold at this distance from the Sun (minus 235C) means that these are highly unlikely to be made of water ice: the properties of water ice at this temperature which helped to form the rugged ice mountains don't lend themselves to malleable ice flowing across a surface.  Instead, these glaciers are likely to consist of nitrogen, carbon monoxide and methane, and are likely still slowly flowing over Pluto's ancient craters today (14).

Pluto's active features are thus providing insight into a multi-layered, complex world.  Perhaps life, in the form of extremeophiles, might also exist deep within the planet, submerged in dark, warm oceans.  What is clear from all this is that Pluto is far from being a dead lump of frozen rock.  The surprise here is that, unlike many of the outer solar system moons, Pluto is not in the vicinity of a gas or ice giant planet (which provide their moons with tidal warming, and immersion within a strong magnetic field).  Nonetheless, it experiences internal processes, like tectonic and volcanic activity, which cause widespread re-surfacing. 

Its moon Charon played, and may still contribute a part in this.  Charon's very existence most likely points to a previous catastrophic collision which created the moon, boiled Pluto's interior and set the consequent binary planet system onto its irregular orbital path.  Pluto's almost perfect spherical shape indicates that at some point in its past it must have been spinning very quickly, likely as a result of the giant impact which led to the creation of Charon (14).  Furthermore, Charon's orbit around Pluto is now fairly circular, pointing to a settling of its orbit over a long period of time.  In this same way, Charon's tug on Pluto slowed its spin over time.

So, the planetary collision which affected Pluto must have been a very long time ago.  What caused it?  Was it anything to do with Sedna's odd orbit, or that of the other so-called scattered disk objects beyond the regular Kuiper Belt?  Are these distant cosmic footprints of catastrophism more evidence for the existence of a much larger body further out in the solar system?  I think so.  Clearly, the outer solar system continues to surprise everyone.

It's a curious thing that this proposed formation of the Pluto/Charon planetary couple essentially mirrors that of the Earth/Moon coupling.  What are the odds that two planets in the solar system both get whacked early on, forming massively over-sized moons?  I would think the odds for this are pretty long, yet here we are.  Perhaps this suggests that something else is going on which no one has yet guessed at.  Either way, the occurrence of early catastrophism in the outer solar system is confirmed by these findings by the New Horizons probe, leading us towards a realisation that the previously bland modelling of the zone beyond Neptune is at odds with reality.

Another important point for those considering the existence of Nibiru:  Like Saturn's moon Enceladus, Pluto is now known to be far more active than theoretical models suggested.  Scientists must now consider other mechanisms driving these kinds of active internal processes in planets, especially those located in relative isolation from other sizeable worlds.  Such mechanisms might then apply to theoretical Planet X bodies, like Zecharia Sitchin's Nibiru (15), providing us with a distant world which is potentially habitable.  The Dark Star solution (8) still seems the better possibility to me, but no longer can sceptics legitimately argue that the outer solar system is a dead pool.

The New Horizons mission will continue to provide scientists with a staggering amount of data about the Pluto system over the next year or so, and has already proven itself as a great success in wowing the world.  However, the second half of its mission, to conduct a flyby of a suitably large Kuiper Belt Object, is not going so well.  Ground-based initiatives to target a suitable candidate KBO have not hit the jackpot (16): the more exciting prospects are not within range of New Horizon's potential cone of trajectories: the probe is capable of some limited manoeuvrability, which would preferably need to be instigated early into the next 15 years of its continuing mission (17). 

With the poor results from ground-based surveys for KBOs, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) was been put brought into the increasingly urgent search: 

"Hubble will search a small area of the sky, located near the constellation Sagittarius, examining some of the objects New Horizons could reach. To find KBO's among the vast multitude of background stars, mission planners will employ a unique photographic trick.  They will turn the telescope at the predicted rate the distant bodies should be orbiting the sun. Theoretically, KBO's should be seen in images as dots, while stars will be streaked.  If two or more objects are seen with a given minimum brightness, mission planners believe there is a statistical chance a good target could be found.  If this test is successful, the search area will be expanded to a region approximately half a degree across - roughly the size of a full moon as seen from Earth." (18)

This area of the sky is a difficult zone to find distant, dim objects in.  It lies in the Galactic Plane, providing the celestial equivalent of hunting for a needle in a haystack.  It is also the general region of the sky where I suspect the Dark Star is located - its direct observation likely scuppered by similar issues (19). 

If a suitably sized KBO was not found within the required search area in the near future, the New Horizons probe might have been able to fall back on making some long-distant observations of several possible KBO candidates, each observed by the HST.  In keeping with Pluto's colouration, all three of these KBOs are red in colour, "consistent with the expectation that most of the targets in the search area will be members of the 'Cold Classical population'" (20).  As it turned out, Hubble came up trumps, locating several candidate objects early in its search.  The prime candidate, 2014 MU69, named 'PT1' by the New Horizons team, is between 30 and 45km in diameter, has a circular orbit and also belongs to the 'Cold Classical population' in the Kuiper Belt (21).  The rendezvous, if 2014 MU69 is chosen, would be in January 2019 at a distance of 43.4 AU.  2014 MU69 may be a pristine primordial solar system object, or it might be left-over debris from a cosmic collision (22). 

Written by Andy Lloyd, 14-26th July 2015

Dear Mister Lloyd,

By chance I realized you mentioning my translation of the Temple Hymns. Part II has been published recently but still only in German under the title “Encheduanna : Verschlüsselt-Verschollen-Verkannt, Tempelhymnen 20 – 42”. All findings of Part I are confirmed with new technologies and astonishing details a woman high Priest can not have invented  around 2,300 B.C. and ascribing these things to “Deciders” acting long, long before...

Kind regards

Dr. Hermann Burgard

It's good to see that Dr Burgard has produced a further translation of these remarkable Temple Hymns; Part 2 of which was published in August 2014 and is now available to a German-speaking audience.  I've written back to him hoping to glean some more detail - in English - and will continue to keeps readers updated with my progress regarding his important contribution to the understanding of ancient Mesopotamian texts.

I agree entirely, and there has already been plenty of speculation about the various influences which have gone into this artistic creation on the fields of Wiltshire (3) .  There are certainly Egyptian elements to this, in particular the solar disk above the bird's head, reminiscent of the ancient Egyptian god Horus.  Additionally, the way that the bird is circumscribed by an (in this case imperfect) background circle is suggestive of Mesopotamian Winged Disks, for example those of the Zoroastrian god Ahura Mazda, or the Assyrian gods Ashur and Shamash.  Indeed, one could call this a bit of a 'Sha-mash-up'.  Very beautiful though.  Hats off to the guys who created this outstanding artwork.