Pluto's Heart

Pluto’s icy heart is still beating with strange shapes suggesting that the diminutive world is constantly repaving its surface with churning ice.

15:19 07 June 2016

Based on the assessment of the data acquired by New Horizons probe, Pluto’s most recognisable feature – Sputnik Planum, is alive – geologically speaking, that is.

 

Considered the most prominent feature of the diminutive world, it is broken down into an array of polygons and devoid of any impact craters.

 

Researchers, who assessed the highest resolution images captured by the spacecraft last July, said that roiling cells of nitrogen ice remove any blemishes, maintaining a super-smooth appearance.

 

Prof Bill McKinnon from Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, said: "It's a vigorously - from a geological point of view - churning layer of solid nitrogen, and it's [as if] the heart of Pluto is truly beating."

 

Two separate teams that assessed the images produced by Horizons probe’s historic first flyby last year agree that the cellular terrain can only be produced by the dwarf planet’s internal heat.

 

"From the calculated average velocity of convection, about 1.5cm per year, we compute the time needed for the ice surface to renew itself, and therefore the maximum age of the surface of Sputnik Planum, to be about one million years," report Alex Trowbridge, from Purdue University, Indiana, and colleagues in the second of the two Nature papers.