In a groundbreaking discovery, NASA's Webb Space Telescope has detected traces of carbon dioxide and hydrogen peroxide on Charon, Pluto's largest moon. This marks the first time such chemicals have been identified on the moon's surface, which is roughly half the size of Pluto.
Previously, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flyby in 2015 revealed that Charon's surface is covered with water ice. However, scientists were unable to detect certain chemicals at specific infrared wavelengths until the Webb Telescope provided the necessary insights.
\"There's a lot of fingerprints of chemicals that we otherwise wouldn't get to see,\" explained Carly Howett, a New Horizons scientist not involved in the new study. The findings offer deeper understanding of Charon's composition and the processes shaping its surface.
The research, published in Nature Communications on Tuesday, places Pluto and Charon in the Kuiper Belt, a distant region of our solar system. Both celestial bodies are over 3 billion miles (4.83 billion kilometers) from the sun, making them too cold to support life as we know it.
Scientists hypothesize that the detected hydrogen peroxide may result from radiation interacting with water molecules on Charon's surface. Meanwhile, carbon dioxide could be released during impacts, according to Silvia Protopapa from the Southwest Research Institute, a co-author of the study.
This latest discovery is pivotal for understanding Charon's formation and could pave the way for uncovering the composition of other distant moons and planets in our solar system.
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NASA's Webb telescope detects carbon dioxide traces on Pluto's moon
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