The strangely massive land on Pluto, unlike anything previously observed in the solar system, indicates that giant ice volcanoes have been active relatively recently on the dwarf planet, scientists said on Tuesday.
The observation, which was made by analyzing images taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, suggests that Pluto’s interior was much warmer than previously thought, according to a new study in Communications about nature newspaper.
Instead of spewing lava into the air, ice volcanoes emit a “thicker, muddy iceberg or even a glacial solid stream,” said Kelsi Singer, study author and planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado.
Ice volcanoes were already thought to be on many cold moons in the solar system, but Pluto “looks so different from anything we’ve ever seen,” Singer told AFP.
“The features on Pluto are the only huge field of very large icy volcanoes and have a unique wavy terrain texture.”
Singer said it was difficult to determine exactly when the ice volcanoes formed “but we believe they could be just a few hundred million years or more”.
Unlike most of Pluto, the region has no impact craters, which means that “you can not rule out that it is still in the process of formation even today,” he added.
“Extremely important”
Lynnae Quick, a planetologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who specializes in ice volcanoes, said the findings were “extremely important.”
Perspective view of Pluto’s frozen volcanic region. Credits: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute / Isaac Herrera / Kelsi Singer
“They suggest that a small body like Pluto, which should have lost much of its internal heat a long time ago, was able to hold enough energy to facilitate extensive geological activity rather late in its history,” he told French Agency.
“These findings will make us re-evaluate the possibilities of holding liquid water in small, icy worlds away from the Sun.”
“We do not know what could provide the heat needed to cause these icy volcanoes to erupt,” said David Rothery, a professor of planetary geosciences at The Open University.
The study said that one of the structures, Wright Mons, is about five kilometers (three miles) high and 150 kilometers (90 miles) wide and about the same size as one of the largest volcanoes on Earth – Mauna Loa in Hawaii. .
Rothery told AFP he had been to Mauna Loa and “experienced how vast it is”.
“It makes me realize how big Wright Mons is compared to Pluto, which is a much smaller world than ours.”
The images analyzed were taken when the New Horizons – an unmanned nuclear-sized nuclear-sized baby spacecraft – became the first spacecraft to pass by Pluto in 2015.
It gave the biggest picture so far of Pluto, which has long been considered the most distant planet from the Sun before being reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006.
“I like the idea that we have so much to learn about the solar system,” Singer said.
“Every time we go somewhere new, we find new things we did not anticipate – such as giant, newly formed frozen volcanoes on Pluto.”
Tombaugh’s discovery of Pluto revolutionized the knowledge of our solar system More info: Kelsi Singer, Large-scale cryopreservation on Pluto, Communications about nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038 / s41467-022-29056-3. www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-29056-3, www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-29056-3
© 2022 AFP
Report: Giant ice volcanoes found on Pluto (2022, March 29) were recovered on March 29, 2022 by
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