It was already known that Pluto, the dwarf planet whose planetary status is the subject of debate, has volcanoes that shape its surface. But now a group of scientists has improved our understanding of the dwarf planet’s surface-forming activities by detecting evidence of relatively recent eruption of ice volcanoes on Pluto.
NASA’s New Horizons mission has sent back to Earth some amazing images it took of Pluto during its 2015 flyby. The spacecraft’s data showed the existence of cryovolcanism (which can be thought of as an icy version of hot volcanic activity on Earth).
NASA suspected the existence of a suspected cryovolcano called Wright Mons on Pluto and said that if confirmed, it would “be the largest such feature ever discovered in the outer solar system.” A study published yesterday in the journal Nature Communications shows that NASA’s predictions are correct. Planetary scientist Kelsi Singer of the Southwest Research Institute stands out as the study’s lead author.
We can easily say that the ice volcanoes of Pluto, some of which reach 7 kilometers high, are quite impressive. They are located in a region with few impact craters, suggesting the presence of sludge-ejecting volcanoes that reshaped the surface relatively recently in the dwarf planet’s history.
Ice volcanoes need a heat source to work. “The presence of these massive features has more heat than expected before New Horizons, in a way that Pluto’s interior structure and evolution allowed more heat to be conserved, or to mobilize water-ice-rich materials late in Pluto’s history,” the researchers wrote. shows that,” he writes.
The team has also published a perspective view of the cryovolcanic region, which gives us a good idea of what the area would look like if we could send a camera and take images for a bird’s eye view.
Scientists have also seen evidence of cryovolcanism in other parts of the Solar System, particularly on the dwarf planet Ceres and Saturn’s moon Titan. But the study’s authors say Pluto’s ice volcanoes and different surface and atmospheric conditions make it “unique among visited places in the solar system.”
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