Oceans in Outer Solar System on Pluto and Large Kuiper Belt Objects, Slowly Freezing Over Time

Credit of NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI) A new study suggests that Pluto and other large Kuiper belt objects started out with liquid oceans which have been slowly freezing over time. The accretion of new material during Pluto’s formation may have generated enough heat to create a liquid ocean that has persisted beneath an icy crust to the present day, despite the dwarf planet’s orbit far from the sun in the cold outer reaches of the solar system. This “hot start” scenario, presented in a paper published June 22 in Nature Geoscience, contrasts with the traditional view of Pluto’s origins as a ball of frozen ice and rock in which radioactive decay could have eventually generated enough heat to melt the ice and form a subsurface ocean. “For a long time people have thought about the thermal evolution of Pluto and the ability of an ocean to survive to the present day,” said coauthor Francis Nimmo, professor of Earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz. “Now that we have images of Pluto’s surface from NASA’s New Horizons mission, we can compare what we see with the predictions of different thermal evolution models.” Because water expands when it freezes and contracts when it melts, the hot-start and cold-start scenarios have different implications for the tectonics and resulting surface features of Pluto, explained...
Read More........

Facial recognition software helped identify 1,100 Delhi rioters: Amit Shah

Police and security agencies have so far identified 1,100 people who were actively engaged in violence and mayhem during the three days of organised rioting in the national capital, home minister Amit Shah told Parliament today. Responding to a discussion on the recent law and order situation in some parts of Delhi in Lok Sabha, Shah said more than 700 FIRs have been registered so far and a total of 2,647 people have been detained or arrested. He said that more than 25 computers are analysing CCTV footage to identify perpetrators and that the police have appealed to the public for any footage they may have, and many common people have come forward with the footage they shot on their phones.  He noted that on the basis of the scientific analysis, more than 1100 people have been identified, and 40 teams have been formed to arrest those rioters who have been identified.  He said several people crossed over from Uttar Pradesh specifically to incite riots, which shows that this was a well-planned conspiracy. He said that one of the first actions on the part of the police was the sealing of the UP-Delhi border at 10 PM on 24 of February. Shah said the riots spread fast because of the high population density of the affected areas, which has a mixed population. He said, the narrow lanes prevented effective timely intervention...
Read More........