Pluto's Mountains May be Recently Active Ice Volcanoes, New Horizons Reveals

First Posted: Nov 10, 2015 11:20 AM EST

NASA is learning more and more about Pluto as New Horizons continues to beam back data to Earth after its historic flyby. Now, researchers are getting a closer look at what appear to be icy mountains on the dwarf planet.

Recently, New Horizons geologists combined images of Pluto's surface to make 3D maps that indicate two of Pluto's most distinctive mountains may actually be cryovolcanoes. Cryovolcanoes are ice volcanoes that may have been active in the recent geologic past.

Both of the cyrovolcano candidates are large features that measure tens of miles across and are several miles high.

"These are big mountains with a large hole in their summit, and on Earth that generally means one thing-a volcano," said Oliver White, New Horizons postdoctoral researcher, in a news release. "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."

Ice volcanoes on Pluto are expected to emit a melted slurry of substances such as water ice, nitrogen, ammonia or methane. If Pluto proves to have volcanoes, it will provide an important new clue to its geologic and atmospheric evolution.

Currently, the researchers are still looking into these volcanoes, since nothing like this has yet to be seen in the deep outer solar system. Hopefully new data from New Horizons will tell scientists a bit more about these features.

For more information about the New Horizons mission, visit NASA's website.

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Tagspluto, Pluto Moon, New Horizons, NASA New Horizons Spacecraft, Volcano, Cryovolcano, Ice, space