{"id":62729,"date":"2024-08-27T09:13:21","date_gmt":"2024-08-27T09:13:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/4e6f4650-022f-4944-8cde-2d828dcbd4a1"},"modified":"2024-08-27T09:39:43","modified_gmt":"2024-08-27T09:39:43","slug":"what-colour-really-is-pluto-and-how-accurate-are-the-images-we-see-of-it","status":"publish","type":"rss_feed","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcskyatnight\/rss_feed\/what-colour-really-is-pluto-and-how-accurate-are-the-images-we-see-of-it\/","title":{"rendered":"What colour really is Pluto, and how accurate are the images we see of it?"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>

By <\/p>

Published: Tuesday, 27 August 2024 at 09:13 AM<\/p>

\n\n

When the New Horizons spacecraft captured those amazing images of Pluto during its close approach, its colour seemed to be a mix of browny red, light yellows and blues and greys.<\/p>

Pluto’s red colour is thought to be a result of the Sun breaking up hydrocarbons on the surface into compounds called tholins.<\/p>

Find out more about the colours of the Solar System planets<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>

New Horizons’ view of Pluto revealed its colour to be dark red, light yellow and blue and grey. Credit: NASA\/JHUAPL\/SwRI<\/figcaption><\/figure>
However, in 2018 NASA released newly-processed versions of the New Horizons image, presenting what NASA called the most accurate representation of Pluto’s colour, according to how the human eye would see it.<\/p>
This image revealed Pluto to be a muddle of dark and light greys and browns.<\/p>
But what colour is Pluto and how has the dwarf planet appeared to astronomers and observatories over the years?<\/p>
$\"Left:$
Left: New Horizons’ view of Pluto released in 2015 and right: a ‘true’ colour image of Pluto released in 2018. Click to expand. Credit: NASA\/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory\/Southwest Research Institute\/Alex Parker<\/figcaption><\/figure>
Pluto’s discovery<\/strong><\/h2>
“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them,” wrote William Shakespeare in \u2018Twelfth Night\u2019.<\/p>
Little Pluto falls firmly into the latter camp.<\/p>
This tiny dwarf planet is a relic of the Sun\u2019s protoplanetary disc: billions of years ago, when matter in orbit around the Sun was busy clumping together to form the planets, Pluto formed far out in the region that would eventually become known as the Kuiper Belt<\/a>.<\/p>
$\"Clyde$
Clyde Tombaugh pictured at a Zeiss Blink Comparator, a machine used in the discovery of Pluto. Credit: Lowell Observatory Archives<\/figcaption><\/figure>
And there Pluto sat quietly, undetected, for billions of years\u2026 until its existence was first hypothesised in 1909 by Percival Lovell, based upon his observation of perturbations in the orbit of Uranus.<\/p>
Pluto’s existence was then confirmed in 1930 observations by Clyde Tombaugh<\/a>, at which point it was declared the Solar System\u2019s ninth planet.<\/p>
There was a problem, though: the more astronomers studied Pluto \u2013 which isn\u2019t easy to do, given its tiny size and its immense distance from Earth \u2013 the more it kept ‘shrinking’.<\/p>
Lowell\u2019s original estimate of Pluto\u2019s mass put it at around seven times that of Earth; following Tombaugh\u2019s observations, that estimate was reduced to roughly the same mass as Earth.<\/p>
By 1948, Pluto was thought to have around 10% the mass of Earth, and by 1976 that estimate had been downgraded to 1%.<\/p>
$\"Hubble$
Hubble Space Telescope images of Pluto released in 2010. Click to expand. Credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Buie (Southwest Research Institute)<\/figcaption><\/figure>
By 2006 it was believed to be just 0.2% as massive as our planet and, following the discovery of Eris and the International Astronomy Union\u2019s adoption of a new definition of \u2018planet\u2019, Pluto was downgraded to \u2018dwarf planet\u2019 status<\/a>.<\/p>
All this confusion was largely a result of the aforesaid difficulties in observing Pluto directly.<\/p>
We didn\u2019t even have a convincingly planet-like image of it until the 1990s, courtesy of the then newly-launched Hubble Space Telescope.<\/p>
In direct observations by ground-based telescopes, Pluto just looks like a star.<\/p>
$\"New$
Credit: NASA\/JHUAPL\/SwRI<\/figcaption><\/figure>
New Horizons gets a view of Pluto’s colour<\/strong><\/h2>
And so in 2006, NASA dispatched its New Horizons probe, which made its closest fly-by of Pluto in 2015, and sent back what are still the best images of the dwarf planet and its five moons that we have.<\/p>
These images revealed much of the surface of Pluto to be covered in a vast, heart-shaped glacier of nitrogen ice, while the planet\u2019s atmosphere \u2013 composed mostly of nitrogen, methane and carbon dioxide \u2013 appeared blue.<\/p>
So the most accurate answer to the question \u201cWhat colour is Pluto?\u201d is, \u201cIt depends where you\u2019re looking from\u201d.<\/p>
If you could stand on the surface of Uranus or Neptune and peer at Pluto through a telescope, it would look blue, but if you stood on Pluto itself, the ground beneath your feet would either be white, if you were standing on the aforesaid glacier.<\/p>
Pluto’s colour could range from black, grey or brown to orange, depending on the exact constitution of the rocks beneath your feet.<\/p>
Although that, sadly, is something we still don\u2019t know much about, as no human-made spacecraft has ever landed on Pluto, and there are currently no plans to send one.<\/p> <\/body><\/html>\n
","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Published: Tuesday, 27 August 2024 at 09:13 AM When the New Horizons spacecraft captured those amazing images of Pluto during its close approach, its colour seemed to be a mix of browny red, light yellows and blues and greys. Pluto’s red colour is thought to be a result of the Sun breaking up hydrocarbons […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":62730,"template":"","categories":[1],"acf":{"readingTimeMinutes":"4"},"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/77\/2024\/08\/what-colour-really-is-pluto-and-how-accurate-are-the-images-we-see-of-it.jpg",1200,1200,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/77\/2024\/08\/what-colour-really-is-pluto-and-how-accurate-are-the-images-we-see-of-it-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/77\/2024\/08\/what-colour-really-is-pluto-and-how-accurate-are-the-images-we-see-of-it-300x300.jpg",300,300,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/77\/2024\/08\/what-colour-really-is-pluto-and-how-accurate-are-the-images-we-see-of-it-768x768.jpg",768,768,true],"large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/77\/2024\/08\/what-colour-really-is-pluto-and-how-accurate-are-the-images-we-see-of-it-1024x1024.jpg",800,800,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/77\/2024\/08\/what-colour-really-is-pluto-and-how-accurate-are-the-images-we-see-of-it.jpg",1200,1200,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/77\/2024\/08\/what-colour-really-is-pluto-and-how-accurate-are-the-images-we-see-of-it.jpg",1200,1200,false]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"importmanagerhub@sprylab.com","author_link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcskyatnight\/author\/importmanagerhubsprylab-com\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"By Published: Tuesday, 27 August 2024 at 09:13 AM When the New Horizons spacecraft captured those amazing images of Pluto during its close approach, its colour seemed to be a mix of browny red, light yellows and blues and greys. Pluto’s red colour is thought to be a result of the Sun breaking up hydrocarbons…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcskyatnight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed\/62729"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcskyatnight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcskyatnight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/rss_feed"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcskyatnight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcskyatnight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcskyatnight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcskyatnight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}

New Horizons’ view of Pluto revealed its colour to be dark red, light yellow and blue and grey. Credit: NASA\/JHUAPL\/SwRI<\/figcaption><\/figure>
However, in 2018 NASA released newly-processed versions of the New Horizons image, presenting what NASA called the most accurate representation of Pluto’s colour, according to how the human eye would see it.<\/p>
This image revealed Pluto to be a muddle of dark and light greys and browns.<\/p>
But what colour is Pluto and how has the dwarf planet appeared to astronomers and observatories over the years?<\/p>
$\"Left:$
Left: New Horizons’ view of Pluto released in 2015 and right: a ‘true’ colour image of Pluto released in 2018. Click to expand. Credit: NASA\/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory\/Southwest Research Institute\/Alex Parker<\/figcaption><\/figure>
Pluto’s discovery<\/strong><\/h2>
“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them,” wrote William Shakespeare in \u2018Twelfth Night\u2019.<\/p>
Little Pluto falls firmly into the latter camp.<\/p>
This tiny dwarf planet is a relic of the Sun\u2019s protoplanetary disc: billions of years ago, when matter in orbit around the Sun was busy clumping together to form the planets, Pluto formed far out in the region that would eventually become known as the Kuiper Belt<\/a>.<\/p>
$\"Clyde$
Clyde Tombaugh pictured at a Zeiss Blink Comparator, a machine used in the discovery of Pluto. Credit: Lowell Observatory Archives<\/figcaption><\/figure>
And there Pluto sat quietly, undetected, for billions of years\u2026 until its existence was first hypothesised in 1909 by Percival Lovell, based upon his observation of perturbations in the orbit of Uranus.<\/p>
Pluto’s existence was then confirmed in 1930 observations by Clyde Tombaugh<\/a>, at which point it was declared the Solar System\u2019s ninth planet.<\/p>
There was a problem, though: the more astronomers studied Pluto \u2013 which isn\u2019t easy to do, given its tiny size and its immense distance from Earth \u2013 the more it kept ‘shrinking’.<\/p>
Lowell\u2019s original estimate of Pluto\u2019s mass put it at around seven times that of Earth; following Tombaugh\u2019s observations, that estimate was reduced to roughly the same mass as Earth.<\/p>
By 1948, Pluto was thought to have around 10% the mass of Earth, and by 1976 that estimate had been downgraded to 1%.<\/p>
$\"Hubble$
Hubble Space Telescope images of Pluto released in 2010. Click to expand. Credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Buie (Southwest Research Institute)<\/figcaption><\/figure>
By 2006 it was believed to be just 0.2% as massive as our planet and, following the discovery of Eris and the International Astronomy Union\u2019s adoption of a new definition of \u2018planet\u2019, Pluto was downgraded to \u2018dwarf planet\u2019 status<\/a>.<\/p>
All this confusion was largely a result of the aforesaid difficulties in observing Pluto directly.<\/p>
We didn\u2019t even have a convincingly planet-like image of it until the 1990s, courtesy of the then newly-launched Hubble Space Telescope.<\/p>
In direct observations by ground-based telescopes, Pluto just looks like a star.<\/p>
$\"New$
Credit: NASA\/JHUAPL\/SwRI<\/figcaption><\/figure>
New Horizons gets a view of Pluto’s colour<\/strong><\/h2>
And so in 2006, NASA dispatched its New Horizons probe, which made its closest fly-by of Pluto in 2015, and sent back what are still the best images of the dwarf planet and its five moons that we have.<\/p>
These images revealed much of the surface of Pluto to be covered in a vast, heart-shaped glacier of nitrogen ice, while the planet\u2019s atmosphere \u2013 composed mostly of nitrogen, methane and carbon dioxide \u2013 appeared blue.<\/p>
So the most accurate answer to the question \u201cWhat colour is Pluto?\u201d is, \u201cIt depends where you\u2019re looking from\u201d.<\/p>
If you could stand on the surface of Uranus or Neptune and peer at Pluto through a telescope, it would look blue, but if you stood on Pluto itself, the ground beneath your feet would either be white, if you were standing on the aforesaid glacier.<\/p>
Pluto’s colour could range from black, grey or brown to orange, depending on the exact constitution of the rocks beneath your feet.<\/p>
Although that, sadly, is something we still don\u2019t know much about, as no human-made spacecraft has ever landed on Pluto, and there are currently no plans to send one.<\/p> <\/body><\/html>\n
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By Published: Tuesday, 27 August 2024 at 09:13 AM When the New Horizons spacecraft captured those amazing images of Pluto during its close approach, its colour seemed to be a mix of browny red, light yellows and blues and greys. Pluto’s red colour is thought to be a result of the Sun breaking up hydrocarbons […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":62730,"template":"","categories":[1],"acf":{"readingTimeMinutes":"4"},"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/77\/2024\/08\/what-colour-really-is-pluto-and-how-accurate-are-the-images-we-see-of-it.jpg",1200,1200,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/77\/2024\/08\/what-colour-really-is-pluto-and-how-accurate-are-the-images-we-see-of-it-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/77\/2024\/08\/what-colour-really-is-pluto-and-how-accurate-are-the-images-we-see-of-it-300x300.jpg",300,300,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/77\/2024\/08\/what-colour-really-is-pluto-and-how-accurate-are-the-images-we-see-of-it-768x768.jpg",768,768,true],"large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/77\/2024\/08\/what-colour-really-is-pluto-and-how-accurate-are-the-images-we-see-of-it-1024x1024.jpg",800,800,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/77\/2024\/08\/what-colour-really-is-pluto-and-how-accurate-are-the-images-we-see-of-it.jpg",1200,1200,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/77\/2024\/08\/what-colour-really-is-pluto-and-how-accurate-are-the-images-we-see-of-it.jpg",1200,1200,false]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"importmanagerhub@sprylab.com","author_link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcskyatnight\/author\/importmanagerhubsprylab-com\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"By Published: Tuesday, 27 August 2024 at 09:13 AM When the New Horizons spacecraft captured those amazing images of Pluto during its close approach, its colour seemed to be a mix of browny red, light yellows and blues and greys. Pluto’s red colour is thought to be a result of the Sun breaking up hydrocarbons…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcskyatnight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed\/62729"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcskyatnight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcskyatnight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/rss_feed"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcskyatnight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcskyatnight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcskyatnight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcskyatnight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}