New Horizons reveals huge floating mountains on Pluto
More images from the New Horizons spacecraft have revealed “weirder” features of the dwarf planet Pluto, as scientists have identified enormous “floating mountains” on its surface. The discovery adds to the recent findings on the planet’s incredible diversity of features, including potential ice volcanoes and misbehaving merged moons.
The new observations of the New Horizons mission were presented on Monday at the Division for Planetary Sciences annual meeting. Scientists said that mountains on Pluto could have features that are more like icebergs than mountains on Earth.
The enormous mountains are reportedly probably composed of water ice and are floating on a potential sea of nitrogen ice, according to Jeff Moore from NASA’s Ames Research Centre.
The floating mountains are estimated to be as large as the Rocky Mountains, a major mountain range in the U.S. that stretches about 3,000 miles, the National Geographic reports. Scientists suggest that Pluto’s mountains are buoyant enough to float above denser nitrogen and carbon monoxide ices.
“Even the largest mountains of Pluto could simply be floating,” the National Geographic quoted Moore from the conference. The mountains were lying near the western edge of the heart-shaped ice region of Pluto, known as Sputnik Planum.
With the recent discoveries of the New Horizons mission, Alan Stern, the mission’s principal investigator, said that “the Pluto system is baffling us” with its unique features.
Scientists said that Sputnik Planum as a smooth, young plain could be just 10 million years old. Stern said that the discoveries on Pluto can be considered overall as “a huge finding, that small planets can be active, on a massive scale, billions of years after their formation.”
“It’s hard to imagine how rapidly our view of Pluto and its moons are evolving as new data stream in each week. As the discoveries pour in from those data, Pluto is becoming a star of the solar system,” Stern said in a press release.
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