Clear Horizons? Now For Your Pluto Space Weather Report

Pluto may be, on average, 40 times further away from the sun than Earth, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t experience the sun’s outbursts. And it just so happens that, although it’s extremely difficult to gauge the location and intensity of solar particle clouds at 3.7 billion mile away, a NASA supercomputer has taken on the task and arrived at a space weather report of sorts just in time for New Horizons’ flyby.

As discussed in the video below, it takes around 5 months for a coronal mass ejection (CME) to travel from the sun to the orbit of Pluto (as a comparison, CMEs take between hours to a couple of days to reach Earth), but interplanetary space is a complex environment and it takes some extreme computing power to simulate these energetic clouds of magnetized plasma over those distances.

CMEs are launched from the sun’s highly magnetized lower corona (the sun’s atmosphere) and are composed of ionized particles that can interact with planetary magnetic fields. Should a CME be “geoeffective” when encountering our planet’s magnetosphere, for example, a geomagnetic storm can be triggered, producing spectacular aurorae at high latitudes.

Pluto is much further away from the sun, and by the time a CME reaches the dwarf planet, the plasma will have been stretched out and much less dense than a CME encountering Earth — so the CME is more of a “gentle breeze” by this point. It is currently unknown whether Pluto possesses a magnetic field, but space weather will undoubtedly affect the dwarf planet’s surface, depositing solar plasma, possibly driving some interesting chemistry.

As for the New Horizons flyby, don’t expect anything spectacular in the way of space weather. On July 14, it seems that CME activity should be extremely low during flyby, with a higher density front encountering Pluto later, which could impact the small world’s tenuous atmosphere.

“Our simulation estimates that during the New Horizon approach, Pluto might be immersed in a region with very low solar wind densities, lasting for about one month,” Dusan Odstricil, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., told Spaceweather.com. “This will be followed by a large merged region, which could significantly compress Pluto’s atmosphere.”

Read more at Discovery News