Next TAAA Monthly Meeting: Friday, June 14, 2024
ZOOM ONLY
TAAA’s next general member meeting will be held on Friday, June 14, 2024. The meeting will start at 6:30 P.M. This will be a zoom meeting only. TAAA members will receive a Zoom link to attend. The public may attend online through our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/TucsonAstronomy/. It will be posted to YouTube afterwards.
Presentation: Following Pluto’s Heart: A Look into Pluto’s Past and Present
When NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew through the Pluto system in 2015, it revealed a geologic surface of surprising complexity, which further hinted at the dwarf planet’s unusual hidden depths. The characteristics of Pluto’s thick ice shell and its potentially long-lived subsurface ocean, as well as the composition of its rocky core, remain active questions. The answers to these questions have critical implications for how icy bodies and ocean worlds form across the outer Solar System. In this talk, I will focus on the Sputnik basin, Pluto’s largest impact basin, and investigate its formation conditions, morphology, and proposed association with geologic features elsewhere on the surface. By reproducing the giant impact that formed Sputnik, I can reconstruct Pluto’s evolution over geologic time.
Bio: Dr. Adeene Denton is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory interested in giant impacts and their influence on the history, evolution and tectonic activity of icy satellites, ocean worlds, and Kuiper Belt Objects. Adeene received bachelor’s degrees in History and Earth Science from Rice University in 2016, her MS in Earth, Environmental and Planetary Science from Brown University in 2018, and her PhD in Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Science from Purdue University in 2022. She uses a combination of numerical tools, from shock physics codes to finite element modeling, to explore the effects of giant impacts, which begin in the first few seconds after impact and can extend for hundreds of millions of years. She is passionate about integrating numerical modeling, fieldwork, and everything in between to approach planetary problems. Asteroid 16883 adeenedenton is named for her research on impact processes on outer Solar System worlds, including Pluto.
Caption: Heart of Pluto / Credit: NASA/NEW HORIZONS TEAM