QUOTE (SigurRosFan @ Jan 3 2006, 10:39 PM)
http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/press/pr0601.html -
A Planet Colder Than It Should Be--- Now, for the first time, Smithsonian astronomers using the Submillimeter Array (SMA) on Mauna Kea in Hawaii have taken direct measurements of thermal heat from both worlds and found that Pluto is indeed colder than expected, colder even than Charon.
It found that the temperature of the ice-covered surface of Pluto was about 43 K instead of the expected 53 K, as on nearby Charon. ---
Sorry sports fans, but this is almost all hype. The same result was published in the
mid-1990s by three separate teams (Jewitt 1994 in AJ; Stern et al. 1993
in Science, and Tryka et al. 1993, in Icarus as I recall), each using different
instruments. The cooling is due to latent heat sinks owing to N2 sublimation.
which of course doesn't apply on Charon. ISO followed up on this in the late
1990s and confirmed it in a powerful way (Lellouch et al. ~2000).
The only thing new here is that Charon has been removed from the modeling
by SMA. Nice, but no headliner. Charon contributes only about 25% of the signal.
-Alan