Surface of Pluto May Contain Organic Molecules

[kach22i]

These types of Yahoo news links vanish pretty quickly, so I'm doing a Cut & Paste of the whole article.

Surface of Pluto May Contain Organic Molecules
By SPACE.com Staff
Space.com | SPACE.com – 19 hrs ago
Surface of Pluto May Contain Organic Molecules - Yahoo! News

The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted new evidence of complex organic molecules — the carbon-containing building blocks of life as we know it — on the frigid surface of Pluto, a new study finds.
Hubble observations revealed that some substances on Pluto's surface are absorbing more ultraviolet light than expected. The compounds in question may well be organics, possibly complex hydrocarbons or nitrogen-containing molecules, researchers said.
The dwarf planet Pluto is known to harbor ices of methane, carbon monoxide and nitrogen on its surface. The ultraviolet-absorbing chemical species may have been produced when sunlight or super-speedy subatomic particles known as cosmic rays interacted with these ices, researchers said.
"This is an exciting finding because complex Plutonian hydrocarbons and other molecules that could be responsible for the ultraviolet spectral features we found with Hubble may, among other things, be responsible for giving Pluto its ruddy color," study leader Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., said in a statement.
Pluto circles the sun in a distant ring of icy bodies known as the Kuiper Belt. Many other Kuiper Belt objects are also quite red, and researchers have previously speculated that organics are responsible for their ruddiness as well.
Stern and his colleagues also found that Pluto's ultraviolet spectrum has changed compared to Hubble measurements taken during the 1990s. They used Hubble's powerful Cosmic Origins Spectrograph instrument to make the find.

These differences may be related to changes in the dwarf planet's terrain since then, researchers said. It's possible that a steep increase in Pluto's atmospheric pressure has caused changes in Pluto's surface, they added.
Overall, the new Hubble observations shed further light on Pluto a few years ahead of the first-ever spacecraft visit to the cold, distant world.
"The discovery we made with Hubble reminds us that even more exciting discoveries about Pluto's composition and surface evolution are likely to be in store when NASA's New Horizons spacecraft arrives at Pluto in 2015," Stern said.
New Horizons launched in January 2006 on a 4-billion-mile (6.4-billion-kilometer) journey to Pluto. The probe is due to make its closest approach to the dwarf planet on July 14, 2015. On that date, New Horizons will be just 7,767 miles (12,500 km) away from the frigid world.
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Some additional information:

Biology, Answering the Big Questions of Life/Photosynthesis - Wikibooks, open books for an open world

What is light?
Light is a form of energy. The form of light that plants capture, as well as the light that you and I can see, is called visible light. The white light that shines on Earth from the sun is actually composed of light of many different colors. You can see these colors by using a piece of glass called a prism that can split the light into different colors or wavelengths of light.

The rainbow of light created by a prism is called a spectrum and the colors of light are always in the same order: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo and Violet. It also spreads into colors that we can't see becoming infrared off the edge of the red side of the spectrum, and ultraviolet off of the edge of the violet side of the spectrum.

In fact, the spectrum of light (called the electromagnetic spectrum) is very large going from radio waves as big as planets to very powerful light called gamma rays whose wavelengths can be the size of subatomic particles.
Photosynthesis captures the energy from visible light but it doesn't use all of the colors of light equally. It mostly uses light from the blue and red parts of the spectrum.

I Googled "Electromagnetic Photosynthesis" (plant life not dependent on "visible light" and got this (see below).

Introduction to Photosynthesis

Plants, algae, and bacteria known as cyanobacteria are known as oxygenic photoautotrophs because they synthesize organic molecules from inorganic materials, convert light energy into chemical energy, use water as an electron source, and generate oxygen as an end product of photosynthesis. Some bacteria, such as the green and purple bacteria, are known as anoxygenic phototrophs (def). Unlike the oxygenic plants, algae, and cyanobacteria, anoxygenic phototrophs do not use water as an electron source and, therefore, do not evolve oxygen during photosynthesis. The electrons come from compounds such as hydrogen gas, hydrogen sulfide, and reduced organic molecules. In this section on photosynthesis, we be concerned with the oxygenic phototrophs.

A Goggle search on "photosynthesis based life" lead to the below link.

Non-green photosynthesizers
Hypothetical types of biochemistry - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Physicists have noted that, while photosynthesis on Earth generally involves green plants, a variety of other colored plants could also support photosynthesis, essential for most life on Earth, and that other colors might be preferred in places that receive a different mix of stellar radiation than that received on Earth.[39][40] These studies indicate that while blue photosynthetic plants would be unlikely (because absorbed blue light provides some of the highest photosynthetic yields in the light spectrum[citation needed]), yellow or red plants are plausible. These conclusions are based in part on the luminosity spectra of different types of stars, the transmission characteristics of hypothetical planetary atmospheres, and the absorption spectra of various photosynthetic pigments from organisms on Earth.

The first plants on Earth may have been a slightly different colour, because the Sun was, in the first geological eons, a little less bright, and its light was filtered by passing through an atmosphere with a different composition.

Black is the optimum color for converting all available light to energy as efficiently as possible. It is as of yet unclear exactly why plants on Earth are green and not black.

Again, from the original article.
Surface of Pluto May Contain Organic Molecules - Yahoo! News

Pluto circles the sun in a distant ring of icy bodies known as the Kuiper Belt. Many other Kuiper Belt objects are also quite red, and researchers have previously speculated that organics are responsible for their ruddiness as well.

Just to clarify one of the terms:
Google

Definition for ruddiness:
Web definitions:
a healthy reddish complexion.
wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

[968rz]

here's another take on it.

Complex molecules discovered on Pluto | TG Daily

[vash]

pretty sure there is some organic matter on Uranus too!

rimshot!

[island911]

Pluto's?

[M.D. Holloway]

If Pluto is Mickey Mouses dog what the heack is Goofy? Goofy is his own dog! Goofy answers to no one! No mouse, no duck not even a...what else is there?

[dad911]

Too bad Pluto is no longer a planet...........