This high-resolution photo sent by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft shows that Pluto has icebergs about the same height as the Rocky Mountains in North America and Canada.
The photos also show geological activity on Pluto and its moon, Charon.
On Wednesday (15/7), scientists showed the first photos received by New Horizons after its historic monitoring of the dwarf planet.
The team of scientists also named the heart-shaped region around Pluto after explorer Clyde Tombaugh.
The spacecraft passed Pluto on Tuesday (15/7), approached to a distance of 12,500 km, and collected a large amount of data.
One hundred million years
The mission’s scientist, John Spencer, told reporters that the first images of Pluto’s surface show areas that have gone through geological processes – such as volcanism – in the last 100 million years.
“We haven’t found a single crater basin in the photo. That means this surface must be very new,” he said.
Active geology needs a heat source. Previously, similar activity was seen only on icy moons, which occurred due to “heat waves” caused by gravitational interactions with the large main planet.
“It turns out that heat waves are not needed to initiate geological activity in an icy world. This is an important finding that we only discovered this morning,” said Spencer.
Alan Stern, the mission’s chief scientist commented: “Now we know there is a small isolated planet showing activity after 4.5 billion years.”
According to Stern, the discovery will “encourage many geophysicists to start over from scratch”.
Similar to the Rockies
The same image shows the mountains in the heart-shaped region with a height of up to 3300 meters.
Research team members compared it to the Rocky Mountains in North America.
John Spencer said that the thin layer of methane, carbon monoxide and nitrogen ice on Pluto’s surface was not strong enough to form mountains.
So, it is possible that the mountain was formed from
Pluto’s water-ice rocks, he said.
Ice volcano
The thin layer of nitrogen and other unstable substances on top of Pluto’s water-ice rock is interesting, Stern said.
Because Pluto’s weak atmosphere, which is mostly nitrogen, often disappears into space, he continued.
Recently, Spencer co-authored an academic study with his colleague, Kelsi Singer, about predicting this scenario.
“Kelsi and I predict that if we look at Pluto’s steep topography with unstable layers, there must be internal nitrogen-gathering activity through ice volcanoes (cryo-vulcano) or hot springs (geysers) or other processes that are active until now. on the planet,” said the mission’s chief scientist.
“We haven’t found any hot springs and we haven’t found any ice volcanoes, but the evidence is strong enough that we’re going to look for them.”
In memory scientists have named this heart-shaped region the Tombaugh Region, after the astronomer who discovered Pluto in 1930.
This close-up image of Charon, Pluto’s moon, shows a 6.4-9.6 km deep canyon and is evidence of an active planetary surface shift.
“Initially I thought Charon would have an old surface covered with craters… We were so surprised when we saw the latest images,” said Cathy Olkin.
“From the northeast to the southwest there is a series of cliffs and basins… It is about 965 kilometers long along the moon. The area is very large and probably due to internal processes.”
The dark, conspicuous region around Charon’s pole could be a thin layer of reddish-colored material, he said.
Unofficially, the area is now named Mordor, like the fictional region of Middle Earth in JR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books.
Pluto’s little moon
The first clearest photo of Pluto’s tiny moon, Hydra, shows an elongated shape with a surface made up mostly of ice.
In addition, scientists also found the best estimate of Hydra’s size, 43 x 33 km.
“Hydra is not a planet,” said team member Hal Weaver.
The photo is not sharp because Hydra is so far away and small; New Horizons photographed Hydra from a distance of 650 thousand km.
The photos were sent to Earth in two data transmissions on Wednesday.
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