By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A series of dome-shaped ice volcanoes that look unlike anything else known in our solar system and may still be active have been identified on Pluto using data from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, showing that this world remote frost is more dynamic than previously known.
Scientists said on Tuesday that these cryovolcanoes – perhaps 10 or more – lie somewhere between 1km to 7km high. Unlike Earth’s volcanoes that spew molten gas and rock, this dwarf planet’s cryovolcanoes spew large amounts of ice, apparently frozen water rather than some other frozen material, which may have the consistency of toothpaste, they say.
Features of the asteroid belt of the dwarf planet Ceres, Saturn’s moons Enceladus and Titan, Jupiter’s moon Europa, and Neptune’s moon Triton have also been identified as cryovolcanoes. But they all differ from Pluto’s, the researchers said, because of different surface conditions, such as temperature and atmospheric pressure, as well as different mixes of icy materials.
“Finding these features indicates that Pluto is more active, or geologically alive, than we previously thought,” said planetary scientist Kelsi Singer of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, lead author of the study published in the journal Nature Communications.
“The combination of these features being geologically recent, covering a vast area and likely being made of water ice is surprising because it requires more internal heat than we thought Pluto would have at this stage in its history,” added Singer.
Pluto, which is smaller than Earth’s moon and has a diameter of about 2,380 km, orbits approximately 5.8 billion km from the Sun, about 40 times farther than Earth’s orbit. Its surface features plains, mountains, craters and valleys.
Images and data analyzed in the new study, taken in 2015 by New Horizons, validated previous hypotheses about cryovolcanism on Pluto.
The study found not only extensive evidence of cryovolcanism, but also long-lasting, not a single episode, said Southwest Research Institute planetary scientist Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator and co-author of the study.
“What’s most fascinating about Pluto is that it’s so complex – as complex as Earth or Mars, despite its smaller size and great distance from the Sun,” said Stern. “This was a real surprise from the New Horizons flyby, and the new result on cryovolcanism dramatically emphasizes that.”
Like Earth and the other planets in our solar system, Pluto formed about 4.5 billion years ago. Based on the absence of impact craters that would normally accumulate over time, it appears that their cryovolcanoes are relatively recent – formed within the last few hundred million years.
“This is young on a geological time scale. As there are almost no impact craters, it is possible that these processes are ongoing even today,” Singer said.
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