From its historic flyby of Pluto, the New Horizons spacecraft showed NASA scientists the dwarf planet may well be geologically active and they now know what kind of activity that might be.
According to Space.com, images of Pluto's heart-shaped region show two mounds along its southern crest with peaks that suggest they are volcanoes. The two mountains are gigantic, stretching hundreds of miles across and standing four miles high.
Click here to see NASA's images of the two mountains in high resolution.
Mission managers discussed the findings at the 47th Annual Meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences in National Harbor, Md., according to a press release from NASA.
"It's hard to imagine how rapidly our view of Pluto and its moons are evolving as new data stream in each week. As the discoveries pour in from those data, Pluto is becoming a star of the solar system," Alan Stern, New Horizons' principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., told reporters at the event. "Moreover, I'd wager that for most planetary scientists, any one or two of our latest major findings on one world would be considered astounding. To have them all is simply incredible."
Known as cryovolcanoes, or "ice volcanoes," these would not spew molten rock, but rather ammonia, water ice, or nitrogen.
"These are big mountains with a large hole in their summit, and on Earth that generally means one thing - a volcano," Oliver White, a New Horizons postdoctoral researcher at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., said at the event. "If they are volcanic, then the summit depression would likely have formed via collapse as material is erupted from underneath. The strange hummocky texture of the mountain flanks may represent volcanic flows of some sort that have traveled down from the summit region and onto the plains beyond, but why they are hummocky, and what they are made of, we don't yet know."
