James Webb Telescope detects carbon dioxide on surface of Pluto's largest moon
Data from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope reveal traces of carbon dioxide and hydrogen peroxide on the surface of Pluto's largest moon.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00We were expecting to see carbon dioxide, it's ubiquitous about the carbons everywhere in
00:17the solar system, so it's perhaps not surprising to see it there, but the type, you know, where
00:21it is, the type it is, how it's structured, just give us a better understanding of the
00:25moon itself.
00:27Carbon peroxide is something you only get from radiolysis of water, we know that there's
00:30water there, so again, perhaps not particularly surprising that it's there, but by detecting
00:35the levels we can see we have a constraint on how much radiation's been hitting Charon
00:40perhaps, which radiation's important in Charon's processing, so it sort of points to how it's
00:46evolved.
00:57In 2022 and 2023 we used the near-infrared spectrograph on JWST to conduct four observations
01:07of Charon to ensure full coverage of its northern hemisphere, and like previous observations
01:14which were limited up to 2.5 microns, this new data enabled to extend the wavelength's
01:21coverage up to 5 micron.