OKAY, HERE’S THE one you’ve been waiting for: Here is the first true close-up picture of Pluto’s surface, focused on the edge of the southeastern hemisphere. It shows that Pluto has mountains, and that those mountains are made of water ice. And most exciting of all—those mountains might be geologically active.
“The most striking geology is that we haven’t found a single impact crater,” says John Spencer, one of New Horizons’ lead scientists. “That means this is a very young surface.” “Young” being less than 100 million years old.
So what could be driving that geologic activity? There’s no planetary body large enough to be driving tidal energy, so Spencer speculates that the energy could be driven by latent radioactive energy, or a large interior ocean could release energy as it freezes. Or, the planet could be storing energy from its formation through some other, unknown process.
And yeah, about that water. See those mountains? Those are about 11,000 feet tall. Frozen nitrogen and methane would crumble under their own weight at those elevations. And because of Pluto’s mass and size, they can’t be bedrock. The only way to balance that equation is ice.
Stay tuned for more science, more pictures, and more excitement from the Pluto system.]