Pluto's Atmosphere in Plateau Phase Since 2015 from a Stellar Occultation at Devasthal
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. ; A stellar occultation by Pluto was observed on 2020 June 6 with the 1.3 m and 3.6 m telescopes located at Devasthal, Nainital, India, using imaging systems in the I and H bands, respectively. From this event, we derive a surface pressure for Pluto's atmosphere of psurf=12.23-0.38+0.65 μbar. This shows that Pluto's atmosphere has been in a plateau phase since mid-2015, a result which is in excellent agreement with the Pluto volatile transport model of Meza et al. This value does not support the pressure decrease reported by independent teams, based on occultations observed in 2018 and 2019 by Young et al. and Arimatsu et al., respectively. © 2021. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. ; The authors are grateful to the Directors of ARIES and IIA for granting time under Directors' Discretionary Time allotment for observing this event. The authors also thank the staff of the Devasthal Observatory and the IR Group at TIFR for their help during observations. The work leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Community's H2020 2014-2021 ERC Grant Agreement no. 669416 "Lucky Star." Research at PRL and IIST is supported by the Department of Space, Government of India. M.A., G.B.-R., F.B.-R., and R.V.-M. thank CNPq and CAPES for grants 313144/2020-6, 314772/2020-0, 465376/2014-2, and Process 88887.310463/2018-00—Project 88887.571156/2020-00. R.V.-M. also thanks grant CNPq 304544/2017-6. P.S-S. acknowledges financial support by the Spanish grant AYA-RTI2018-098657-J-I00 "LEO-SBNAF" (MCIU/AEI/FEDER, UE). ; With funding from the Spanish government through the Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence accreditation SEV-2017-0709. ; Peer reviewed