Santa Cruz: A latest study based on so far unpublished data revealed that the dwarf planet Eris is surprisingly dissipative and ‘squishier’ than previously thought.
Eris, Pluto and Ceres are placed in the newly created category of dwarf planet as they did not meet all of the requirements to be called a planet.
The latest finding about the structure of Eris is the result of the efforts of Michael Brown, one of the discoverers of Eris, at the California Institute of Technology, who was joined by University of California, Santa Cruz Professor of Planetary Sciences Francis Nimmo to do more research on the former’s unpublished data.
After months of efforts, Nimmo and Brown found that Eris is surprisingly dissipative, or "squishy."
In the findings published in a Science Advances paper, the two revealed that Eris has a rocky core surrounded by a layer of ice. This outer shell of ice is likely convecting, unlike the conducting shell of Pluto.
"The rock contains radioactive elements, and those produce heat. And then that heat has to get out somehow," explained Nimmo.
"So as the heat escapes, it drives this slow churning in the ice”, he added.
“Eris therefore behaves less like a rigid object and ‘more like a soft cheese or something like that’ also having a tendency to flow a bit," said Nimmo.
Brown and Nimmo also discovered that Eris and its moon, Dysnomia, always face the same way toward each other.
"That happens because the big planet gets spun down by the tides that the little moon raises on it," explained Nimmo.
"The bigger the moon is, the faster the planet spins down”, he added.
The upper limit on the mass of Dysnomia came from measurements made by the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) radio telescope. Nimmo hopes that soon, more exact measurements of the mass will help further refine the model.
"If Dysnomia is smaller than that, then Eris is even squishier," Nimmo said.
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