Important Discovery of Pluto's Ice Volcano

Ice volcanoes have been found to exist on a number of icy moons in the Solar System, however the ice volcanoes on Pluto have a different appearance from all other ice volcanoes seen.

A strange bumpy topography on Pluto suggests that ice volcanoes have been active quite recently on the dwarf planet. This is a new discovery announced by scientists on March 29.

Pluto's surface.

According to a new study published in the journal Nature Communications, scientists came to the above conclusion after analyzing images taken by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, showing the inner part of the body. Pluto's interior is much hotter than previously thought by scientists.

Instead of spewing lava into the air, glacial volcanoes spew out a slurry of ice and water, said Kelsi Singer, an author of the study and a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado. water or maybe even a stream of solids like a glacier. 

According to Singer, ice volcanoes have been found to exist on a number of icy moons in the Solar System, but the ice volcanoes on Pluto have a different appearance from all other ice volcanoes seen from Earth. before to now.

A special feature on Pluto is a single large band of very large ice volcanoes and they have a unique texture with rough terrain.

Singer said it is difficult to determine exactly when these ice volcanoes formed, but scientists believe it could be several hundred million years or less.

Unlike most Pluto, this region has no impact craters, meaning that it is still in the process of forming even today.

Lynnae Quick, a planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center specializing in the study of ice volcanoes, stressed these new findings are extremely important.

They show that small objects like Pluto, which should have lost most of their internal heat long ago, can still hold enough energy to generate large-scale geological activity relatively late in the celestial body's history.

She says the findings will prompt scientists to re-evaluate the possibilities of keeping liquid water on icy small planets far from the Sun.