The Pluto System After New Horizons (Space Science Series)

STARRY MESSENGER FOM PLUTO’S FURTHEST REALM : FROZEN NEW WORLDS WITH A BEATING HEART OF ICEWonderful details of all the marvels found by New Horizons in 2015. Made me weep for joy then, and more so now. The Solar System keeps bringing out fully working worlds in miniature to make us gasp and stretch our eyes.Pluto has a vast white heart-shaped scar, front and centre, made by Charon, and filled with Nitrogen ice. This and Methane constantly freeze and sublimate to build the poetry on top of a crust of solid Water Ice. The Nitrogen sparkles pure white in plains and living sheets and glaciers. Pluto goes round on its side to add constant variety to the weather, with wobbles that would make Milankovitch proud.GLOBAL CLIMATE MODELS. It is refreshing to see GCMs routinely torn to bits as hopelessly underpowered and mostly reflecting the assumptions of their creators. The same GCMs are now directing the fortunes of our own dear planet, where they are above criticism.The magically named Oz Terra is the biggest feature on Charon, which is quite a small world, so it a shame that it is jumped over quite quickly.PLANETARY PINBALL. There are a lot of small and middling problems with the setup of the Solar System, which are too hard for the poor planetary scientists to work out. So they have invented an Awfully Big Adventure instead - Planetary Migration. This lets them continue to get research grants, play in the sandpit, move the major planets around, and simply throw away the evidence. They still feel able to leave in all of the huge commonality and complexity built in at the start and only at the start, and move planets in and out to fit. This is called the "Nice Planetary Migration" model, and the time for it gets shorter and shorter, and it has to be smoother and smoother. Smoother and Swifter than you could possibly imagine, oh Best-Beloved. Pinball Wizard required. These ramblings do take up a lot of space at the end, where they are trying to shoehorn Pluto in to this alternative universe. The Exoplanet Handbook, 2nd Edition, by Perryman 2018, gives a more balanced view of Migration.SCIENTIFIC MYTHS. The historical introduction is a bit too potted , and we are again treated to Galileo as the Scientific Hero before his time against the Benighted Church. In fact many leading churchmen agreed with and supported his work. His fiercest critics were the dullards and laggards who taught at the Universities. Galileo then deliberately chose a fight with Scripture over the epicycles of Copernicus - obscure, mistaken and outmoded - and unsurprisingly could offer no proof to support them. It is as if the New Horizons Team had insulted NASA and got their sums wrong.Of course the real hero is Kepler, working for the Catholic Emperor, and with data half stolen from Protestant Denmark, who had already published that planets move in Ellipses. He also had to fight a Witch hunt, against his mother, so he understood our modern concerns.The reader is directed to Koestler, The Sleepwalkers, who demolished these myths in 1959.