Images from NASA’s New Horizons probe show what appear to be ice-spewing volcanoes on the surface of the dwarf planet Pluto, and if confirmed, it would mark the first time this type of geological feature had ever been detected in our solar system.
According to Reuters and BBC News reports, the two mountains (provisionally named Wright Mons and Piccard Mons) are several miles high and more than 100 miles in diameter. Both mountains have what appears to be a depression at the top, NASA explained on Monday at an American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting in Maryland.
While additional research is needed to confirm the discovery, if these are volcanoes, it is likely that they will erupt an icy slush of water, nitrogen, ammonia and/or methane. Their presence also raises questions about how Pluto has managed to be so geologically active over its lifetime, and suggests that the dwarf planet once had an internal heat source, Science added.
That heat source likely would have triggered the melting of nitrogen, methane, and other volatile ices, which then would have erupted at the surface, the publication explained. They could also be a way that Pluto periodically replenished volatile ices lost to sublimation in its atmosphere.
Closer analysis needed to confirm their status
Wright Mons and Piccard Mons are located just beyond the southern tip of the dwarf planet’s so-called heart, Sputnik Planum, and have an unmistakably volcanolike shape, Oliver White, a New Horizons team member from the Ames Research Center in California, told Science. The textures of the surface appear to indicate that past eruptions involved plastic—not watery—ice.
Jeff Moore, also from Ames, said that the features “look very suspicious” and that the team was “looking at them closely.” White told BBC News that determining the composition of the terrain would give them “something to work with” in terms of “modeling how this particular ice would behave if it were to be erupted volcanically, and what sort of relief it might be able to sustain.”
New Horizons also reportedly discovered several deep fractures in Pluto’s surface, the largest of which is more than 200 miles long and twice as tall as the Grand Canyon at its highest point. The suspected cause of this feature is the decay of radioactive elements in Pluto’s core, NASA said.
The NASA researchers are presenting more than 50 research papers from the spacecraft’s flyby of the dwarf planet in July during the ongoing AAS meeting, and much more data is expected as only 20 percent of its observations have been downlinked back to Earth as of this point. The New Horizons mission continues, as the probe is currently on pace for an January 2019 flyby of 2014 MU69, an icy Kuiper Belt object roughly 30 miles (50 km) across.
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Feature Image: NASA/JPL-JHU/SWRI
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