reported<\/a> that Charon wasn\u2019t as worn out from atmospheres (which it doesn\u2019t have) or asteroid attacks as other icy moons. What\u2019s more, its craters appeared to be more than four billion years old. In other words, Charon was a promising candidate to investigate the earliest days of icy satellites.<\/p>\n Rewinding the clock <\/p>\n
Previous work suggested that Charon experienced global extension accompanied by cryovolcanism, according to the paper. While studying Oz Terra\u2014a mountainous region in northern Charon\u2014Chen and colleagues found some landforms that were \u201chard to explain by extension,\u201d he said. Specifically, the highlands, which extended about 124 miles (200 kilometers), tended to stretch in the east-west direction. To Chen, a field structural geologist, that seemed more consistent with rotational flattening.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo we looked into a compressional origin for these features and found a plausible dynamic origin,\u201d he explained.<\/p>\n
The team developed a model to assess whether compression caused by despinning could better explain the geological evolution of Oz Terra and confirmed that its analysis aligned nicely with New Horizons data. The modeling results also indicated that Charon\u2019s ice crust shell used to be around 19 to 22 miles (30 to 36 kilometers) thick, but the shell gradually grew thinner via despinning, pressuring Charon\u2019s faultlines and creating the ridges we see today.<\/p>\n
In the earliest moments <\/p>\n
If so, Charon\u2019s initial rotation period would have added up to around 14.3 hours, the paper added. This also suggests that Charon had a \u201ccold start,\u201d and its particular shape was continuously influenced by the residual stress of despinning, the paper explained. But of course, planetary evolution is a complex process with many factors involved. There\u2019s more work to be done in terms of painting a fuller picture of Charon\u2019s evolution, the researchers concluded.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a curiosity-driven study,\u201d Chen added. And even if it doesn\u2019t end up being the right answer, the model should still provide a \u201cnew approach to infer the initial orbital and thermal states of icy satellites from their geologic records,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The solar system\u2019s icy moons are natural labs for astronomy\u2019s most fascinating discoveries. And Charon, Pluto\u2019s largest moon,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":763218,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[12386,16492,4957,79],"class_list":["post-763217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-new-horizons","tag-planetary-science","tag-pluto","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=763217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763217\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/763218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=763217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=763217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=763217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}