Scientists saw various space mysteries that could solve a puzzle about Pluto and the black holes.
Researchers have found evidence that billions of years ago, the dwarf planet may have had an ocean. Scientists have also discovered a non-observed astronomical object.
Pluto has an ocean
Though Pluto is now famously frigid, a new study finds it may have started as a hot world that formed rapidly and violently.
The research, published in Nature Geoscience, indicates Pluto may have been hot enough to allow liquid water to exist on its surface as it was formed.
The results suggest that Pluto has possessed an underground ocean since early in her life, potentially improving her hosting life chances.
Previous research believed Pluto originated from cold and icy rock clumping together in the distant Kuiper Belt, the object ring outside Neptune.
Carver Bierson, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, noted that Pluto currently has a surface temperature of about 45 Kelvin (-380ºF or -228ºC).
Bierson said Pluto had a rapid and violent formation that warmed the interior enough to form a subsurface water ocean.
"Even in this cold environment so far from the Sun, all these worlds might have formed fast and hot, with liquid oceans," Bierson said in a statement.
On the surface of Pluto the researchers studied so-called "extensional characteristics." Water expands as it freezes, and as the interior of Pluto cooled, the surface of Pluto stretched out, creating identifiable structures.
The researchers saw extensional features on Pluto's icy surface - for example, cracks in his shell, and an enigmatic system of ridges and troughs - suggest a hot start for Pluto.
If Pluto had a rapid, violent formation, the heat from the colliding rocks from which Pluto coalesced would have faded relatively fast. The movement would lead to the rapid growth of the icy shell, generating extensional features early in Pluto's history.
This freezing would pause as radioactivity heat became a significant factor and resumed as radioactive elements broke down, slowly creating extended structures.
"I think the most exciting implication is that subsurface oceans may have been common among the large Kuiper Belt objects when they formed," Bierson said.
Such observations indicate that since they developed, Pluto and other large dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt, such as Eris, Makemake, and Haumea, have possessed subsurface oceans. This may have affected the habitability potential of these distant icy worlds, the researchers said.
Blackhole puzzle
Scientists saw a "mystery entity" in space that could solve a black holes puzzle. It is more massive than stars that have collapsed, known as "neutron stars," but it has less mass than black holes.
Writing in the journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the research team assumes the phenomenon would most likely be a light black hole of all possibilities, but they do not rule out any other possibilities.
These "black neutron stars" were not thought probable, and would mean suggestions about how to reinvent neutron stars and black holes. The discovery was carried out in the U.S. and Italy by an international team using gravitational wave detectors.
The object sits right in the type of object discovered by researchers that appears to be lacking when exploring the universe. Researchers have been unable to know if dying stars leave something behind that lies in that enigmatic void, and why finding any entity that sits in it has proved difficult.
"We've been waiting decades to solve this mystery," said Vicky Kalogera, a professor at Northwestern University. "We don't know if this object is the heaviest known neutron star or the lightest known black hole, but either way, it breaks a record."
Charlie Hoy, a Cardiff University, U.K. Ph.D. student who is involved in the study, said the new discovery would transform our understanding. He told BBC News they could not rule out any possibilities.
The object brings up other questions, as well as sitting in the middle of the mass distance. The huge disparity in the object's mass and that of the companion black hole appears to challenge theories about how black holes and neutron stars are formed.
The event 's dramatic, devastating nature also means there's no way researchers can actually see what the object was until it was destroyed. But they are hoping to make further observations that will hopefully find more objects in the mass gap and provide insight into how they are formed.
