Two peaks that loom over the surface of the dwarf planet Pluto have confused planetary scientists for years, strung out in the cold limits of our solar system. Some suggested that it was an ice volcano, spewing large volumes of freezing slush rather than lava. However, no cauldron-like caldera could be observed.
A thorough examination of pictures and topographical data indicates a fusion of several ice volcanoes, some of which are up to 7,000 meters tall and span around 10-150 kilometers. The discovery has sparked a new debate - what keeps Pluto warm enough to support volcanic activity?
These strange surface features, which sit at the southern tip of a massive heart-shaped ice sheet, were first noticed when NASA's New Horizons mission sailed by in July 2015, delivering the first close-up photographs of the frozen former planet and its moons.
The study's findings, "Large-Scale Cryovolcanic Resurfacing on Pluto," were published in the journal Nature Communications on Tuesday.
IN SPACE - JULY 13: In this handout provided by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Pluto's largest moon Charon is shown from a distance of 289,000 miles (466,000 kilometers) from the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) aboard NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, taken on July 13, and released July 15, 2015. New Horizons passed by Pluto July 14, closing to a distance of about 7,800 miles (12,500 kilometers). The image was combined with color information taken from the craft's Ralph instrument. The 1,050-pound piano sized probe was launched January 19, 2006 aboard an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Ice Volcanoes in Pluto Still Erupts
Pluto has a region that astronomers believe was generated by ice volcanoes erupting, which is unusual on the dwarf planet and in the solar system.
Study author Kelsi Singer, a senior research scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, noted in a CNN report that some of the domes shown in the photographs blend together to produce even more giant mountains. But what may have caused them to exist? Volcanic ice.
There have been reports of ice volcanoes elsewhere in our solar system. They produce a new landscape by moving material from the subsurface to the surface. Water, in this case, swiftly turned to ice when it reached Pluto's freezing surface temperatures.
The appearance of these characteristics, Singer said, is unlike that of any other volcanoes in the solar system, whether ice or rocky. They started out as mountains, but there is no caldera at the top, and they are covered with big bumps.
Although Pluto has a rocky core, scientists have long suspected that the planet lacks the necessary inner warmth to support volcanism. There would have been multiple eruption sites to generate the region Singer and her team researched.
The absence of impact craters in the area, observed across Pluto's surface, shows that the ice volcanoes were active very recently. Pluto's core, Singer added, retains more residual heat than predicted.
The location is southwest of the Sputnik Planitia ice sheet, covering a 621-mile-long (1,000-kilometer-long) ancient impact basin. It's mostly comprised of lumpy water ice and is covered with volcanic domes. Wright Mons and Piccard Mons are two of the biggest.
Piccard Mons is around 22,965 feet (7 kilometers) high and 139 miles (225 kilometers) broad, whereas Wright Mons is roughly 13,123 to 16,404 feet (4 to 5 kilometers) tall and covers 93 miles (150 kilometers).
Wright Mons is comparable in size to Hawaii's Mauna Loa volcano, one of the world's most active volcanoes.
Calderas are depressions in the heart of volcanoes on Earth and other planets that emerge when a recently erupted volcano collapses into the void left by all the debris, it shot forth.
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Understanding Pluto's Volcanic Activity
Scientists aren't sure how Pluto's cryovolcanic activity works. But it's most likely fuelled by radiogenic heat produced by radioactive materials decaying in the dwarf planet's innards.
Although Pluto lacks plate tectonics, Space.com said the intricate system of moving continental crust underpins geologic activity on Earth, a comparable phenomena is one of the sources of heat in the Earth's core.
Scientists refer to geologic activity on Pluto as "general tectonics," which may produce characteristics like faults in rock but lacks tectonic plates.
There is still a lot that scientists don't know about these structures, how they arose, and how cryovolcanism operates on Pluto. Given earlier evidence showing Pluto was hot when it initially formed and might still have a liquid ocean beneath its ice surface, the thought that liquid water could exist beneath Pluto's surface boosts the probability of life being on Pluto from almost non-existent to somewhat more feasible.
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