NASA released possibly the most stunning photo of Pluto to date and detailed what the image means.
In a news release Thursday, NASA unveiled a shot from the New Horizons spacecraft showing the distant dwarf planet backlit and in color. Emanating from Pluto's horizon is a bright blue ring, indicating the dwarf planet has blue skies.
"Who would have expected a blue sky in the Kuiper Belt? It's gorgeous," Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colo., said in a press release.
According to The Washington Post, the particles in Pluto's haze appearing blue seemingly indicates the atmospheric reaction is similar to the one that gives the Earth's skies its blue color.
"That striking blue tint tells us about the size and composition of the haze particles," Carly Howett, a science team researcher at SwRI, said in the release. "A blue sky often results from scattering of sunlight by very small particles. On Earth, those particles are very tiny nitrogen molecules. On Pluto they appear to be larger - but still relatively small - soot-like particles we call tholins."
NASA also discovered patches of exposed water ice visible on Pluto's surface.
"Large expanses of Pluto don't show exposed water ice," said science team member Jason Cook, of SwRI, said in the release, "because it's apparently masked by other, more volatile ices across most of the planet. Understanding why water appears exactly where it does, and not in other places, is a challenge that we are digging into."
