Reconciling results of 2019 and 2020 stellar occultations on Pluto's atmosphere. New constraints from both the 5 September 2019 event and consistency analysis

TL;DR

This study reconciles past Pluto atmospheric pressure measurements using new and reanalyzed stellar occultation data, revealing consistent long-term trends and highlighting the need for continuous monitoring to understand atmospheric variations.

Contribution

It provides a unified analysis of multiple occultation events, clarifies pressure variation patterns, and assesses the volatile transport model's applicability to Pluto's atmosphere.

Findings

2019 event pressure aligns with 2016, 2018, 2020 measurements

Pressure variations include rapid drops and plateau phases

V-shaped pressure variations are debated due to observational limitations

Abstract

A stellar occultation by Pluto on 5 September 2019 yielded positive detections at two separate stations. Using an approach consistent with comparable studies, we derived a surface pressure of $11.478 \pm 0.55~\mathrm{\mu bar}$ for Pluto's atmosphere from the observations of this event. In addition, to avoid potential method inconsistancies highlighted by Sicardy et al. when comparing with historical pressure measurements, we reanalyzed the data by 15 August 2018 and 17 July 2019 events, respectively. All the new measurements provide a bridge between the two different perspectives on the pressure variation since 2015: a rapid pressure drop from previous studies of the 15 August 2018 and 17 July 2019 events and a plateau phase from that of the 6 June 2020 event. The pressure measurement from the 5 September 2019 event aligns with those from 2016, 2018, and 2020, supporting the latter perspective. While the measurements from the 4 June 2011 and 17 July 2019 events suggest probable V-shaped pressure variations unaccounted for by the volatile transport model (VTM) from Meza et al., the VTM remains applicable on average. And, the validity of the V-shaped variations is debatable due to the stellar faintness of the 4 June 2011 event and the grazing single-chord geometry of the 17 July 2019 event. To reveal and understand all significant pressure variations of Pluto's atmosphere, it is essential to provide constraints on both short-term and long-term evolutions of the interacting atmosphere and surface by continuous pressure monitoring through occultation observations, whenever possible, complemented by frequent spectroscopy and photometry of the surface.