Scientists armed with the immense observing power of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have detected faint traces of fluorescent flatulence leaking out from the dwarf planet Makemake, which lurks in the outer reaches of the solar system. This is only the second time that a gas has been detected on an object this far from Earth, and hints that this wee world is far more active than we once thought.
Makemake is a roughly spherical object measuring around 890 miles (1,430 kilometers) across, which is less than half the diameter of the moon. It is located around 45 times further from the sun than Earth on average, in a region known as the Kuiper Belt — a ring of asteroids, comets and larger icy objects, such as Pluto, beyond the orbit of Neptune. It was discovered in 2005 and has a small moon, dubbed MK2, which is around 110 miles (175 km) across.
Scientists have long known that Makemake’s reddish-brown surface is covered with layers of methane and ethane ice, and some even think that small pellets of these chemicals, measuring around half an inch (1 centimeter) in diameter, may rest on its cold surface, according to NASA.
But in a new study, uploaded Sept. 8 to the preprint server arXiv and accepted for future publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers used JWST to take a closer look at Makemake and found that the planetary dwarf also has faint concentrations of methane gas surrounding its icy surface.
“The Webb telescope has now revealed that methane is also present in the gas phase above the surface, a finding that makes Makemake even more fascinating,” study lead author Silvia Protopapa, a researcher at the University of Maryland and the Southwest Research Institute in Texas, said in a statement. “It shows that Makemake is not an inactive remnant of the outer solar system, but a dynamic body where methane ice is still evolving.”
Until now, the only other trans-Neptunian object (an object beyond Neptune) known to produce its own gas is Pluto, which has a…
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