Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to That's beautiful!

In the cryogenic regime

I too was musing, thinking about how Pluto and the Kuiper Belt environment. To say it's cold doesn't begin to capture the potential alienness of the place. The cold and distribution of objects and materials. We're more familiar with cold realms that experience occasional heating, leading to distribution and homogenization. But if it never warms up out there, will we see clumping of material, and organization into unfamiliar patterns like those orthogonal light patches? I don't expect to see a "frozen sea", which implies once-liquid; what will a world look like that's always been cryogenic? And as for collisions, what are relative velocities like out there? You expect craters because you expect high-velocity impacts, but what if the Kuiper Belt is characterized by lots of slow grazing collisions?

So many questions. And I hope to get so many answers compressed into a couple of days next week.

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