Digging Into the Surface of the Icy Dwarf Planet Eris

Details Digging Into the Surface of the Icy Dwarf Planet Eris Digging Into the Surface of the Icy Dwarf Planet Eris

Sep 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008dps....40.3606t&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #40, #36.06; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 40, p.462

Physics

Geophysics

1

Scientific paper

We describe optical spectroscopic observations of the icy dwarf planet Eris with the 6.5 meter MMT telescope and the Red Channel Spectrograph. We find a correlation between blue shift and albedo at maximum absorption for five methane ice bands. We interpret the correlation as an increasing dilution of methane ice with another ice component, probably nitrogen, with increasing depth into the surface of Eris. What could cause an increase in nitrogen abundance with depth? Perhaps we are seeing Eris 50 degrees from pole-on (Brown and Schaller, 2008, Science, 316, 1585), and if so, the pole we are seeing now at aphelion was in winter darkness at perihelion. Near perihelion, sublimation could have built up atmospheric pressure on the sunlit (summer) hemisphere sufficient to drive winds toward the dark (winter) hemisphere, where the winds would condense. Because nitrogen was more volatile and scarcer than methane, it sublimated from the sunlit hemisphere relatively early in the season, so the early summer atmosphere was nitrogen-rich, and so was the ice deposited on the winter pole. Later in the season, much of the nitrogen was exhausted from the summer pole, but there was plenty of methane, which continued to sublimate. At this point, the atmospheric was more depleted in nitrogen, as was the ice freezing out on top of the earlier deposited nitrogen-rich ice. Further observations of Eris are necessary as our increasing nitrogen abundance with depth apparently contradicts the Licandro et al. (2006, AA, 458, L5) result of decreasing nitrogen abundance with depth.
We gratefully acknowledge support from NASA Planetary Astronomy grant NNG06G138G and NASA Planetary Geology and Geophysics grant NNG04G172G. We thank Steward Observatory for consistent allocation of telescope time on the MMT.

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