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Planetary science

Haze cools Pluto's atmosphere

Nature volume 551, pages 302–303 (2017)Cite this article

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Modelling suggests that Pluto's atmospheric temperature is regulated by haze, unlike the other planetary bodies in the Solar System. The finding has implications for our understanding of exoplanetary atmospheres. See Letter p.352

In 2015, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft captured the first close-up images of Pluto and its moons (http://pluto.jhuapl.edu). It is hard to imagine how anyone who has seen these images could not be both impressed by the achievement and excited by what the images and other data reveal. One of the big surprises1 was that Pluto's atmosphere is much colder than predicted2 at altitudes above 50 kilometres. Because temperature profiles are fundamental to understanding the physics of planetary atmospheres, scientists have been compelled to determine whether key atmospheric processes were missed in earlier studies. On page 352, Zhang et al.3 come to the remarkable conclusion that haze particles, rather than gas molecules, control Pluto's atmospheric temperature.

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Figure 1

Nasa/johns hopkins Univ. applied physics lab/southwest research inst.

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  1. the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, 91109, California, USA

    Robert A. West

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  1. Robert A. West
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Correspondence to Robert A. West.

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West, R. Haze cools Pluto's atmosphere. Nature 551, 302–303 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/551302a

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