On Fri, Jan 29, 2016 at 10:11 PM, Axil Axil <[email protected]> wrote:
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/07/pluto-alive-where-heat-coming > > Pluto is alive—but where is the heat coming from? LENR > > http://www.space.com/29968-pluto-charon-photos-active-icy-worlds.html > > New Photos of Pluto and Moon Surprise, Puzzle Scientists > >From the Space.com article: Signs of recent or ongoing geologic activity have been spotted on other > smallish bodies in the solar system, including Saturn's geyser-spewing moon > Enceladus and the extremely volcanic Jovian satellite Io. But the interiors > of these latter objects are warmed as a result of gravitational tugs from > their huge parent planets, in a process known as tidal heating. > "That can't happen on Pluto, because there is no giant body that can > deform it on a regular basis," Spencer said. "This is telling us that you > do not need tidal heating to power geologic activity on icy moons. That's a > really important discovery that we just made this morning." Another possibility is that tidal heating does little to heat planets, and that what heats them is something else. (Perhaps LENR?) This brings up a related question -- why is it that some conjectures that seem to have only circumstantial evidence (tidal heating, the Big Bang, dark matter, etc.) are elevated to the status of preferred explanations before they've been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt? It seems like you could continue to call them conjectures, and that that would be sufficient. Eric
