Pluto's hazy skies are making the dwarf planet even colder, James Webb Space Telescope find.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has discovered that a hazy sky over frozen Pluto is helping to cool the dwarf planet's atmosphere, while at the same time giving methane and other organic molecules a kick out of Pluto's atmosphere, where some are subsequently being gathered up by Pluto's close companion, Charon.

The discovery of the haze was predicted back in 2017 by planetary scientist Xi Zhang of the University of California, Santa Cruz, to explain why Pluto's thin atmosphere is so leaky. Based on measurements from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, which hurtled past Pluto and Charon in 2015, planetary scientist Will Grundy at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona calculated that Pluto's atmosphere is losing 1.3 kilograms (2.9 pounds) of methane to space every second, and about 2.5% of this methane is being intercepted by Charon, staining its poles red with organic chemistry. Nowhere else in the solar system do we see an atmosphere leaking onto a neighboring body.

The cause of this atmospheric escape was unknown, but Zhang reasoned that if Pluto's atmosphere contained a layer of haze, then this haze would absorb what little extreme ultraviolet light from the distant sun reaches Pluto, providing the energy to give molecules the nudge they need to escape into space.

Source: www.space.com

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