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Ice Volcanoes on Pluto Rise Up Four Miles High

Pluto

Scientists are arguing over “what could be keeping Pluto warm enough to support volcanic activity?” Complex fields of ice volcanoes rising up to four miles from the surface are baffling the experts because nobody can figure out how they got there.

Mystery ice volcanoes on Pluto

Pluto lost her status as a planet in 2006, when the International Astronomical Union decided she didn’t have enough influence for the title.

The big determining factor on approval for membership in the planet club is exerting “orbital dominance” to clear the trash away in the neighborhood surrounding its orbit. Now classified as a “dwarf planet,” it’s barely big enough to become spherical.

Pluto is a long way out from the sun, that means ultra-chilly temperatures. Everyone thought it was way too cold for the kinds of things astronomers are imaging. For instance, a pair of peaks “tower” over the surface.

The experts have been generally guessing they might be be volcano like structures, “spewing out not lava but vast quantities of icy slush.” They had a problem trying to prove it. “no cauldron-like caldera could be seen.

They went and got better pictures. After meticulously analyzing the images and topographical data, they’re convinced that Pluto has not “one ice volcano but a merger of many.” The tiny planetoid has some “up to 7,000 meters tall and about 10-150km across.

That works out to around 4 miles high. By comparison, Mt. Everest is 8848 meters or 5.5 miles high. Now that they know for sure they are there, the big mystery is how? Where is the heat coming from?

Pluto

The least-weird explanation

As related by Dr Kelsi Singer, deputy project scientist at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, sitting “at the southern edge of a vast heart-shaped ice sheet, these unusual surface features were initially spotted when NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew past in July 2015.

She got to see all the nifty close up images because she was a New Horizons co-investigator. The team was “instantly intrigued by this area because it was so different and striking-looking” in the latest images from Pluto.

There are these giant broad mounds,” she points out. “and then this hummocky-like, undulating texture superimposed on top.” Singer then notes “even on top of that there’s a smaller bouldery kind of texture.” She had no idea Pluto could produce that. “At the time, an ice volcano seemed like the least-weird explanation for these features.

Especially since there weren’t any “impact craters from asteroids or meteors nearby.” They couldn’t find any evidence of plate tectonics either. Those are “a key contributor to mountain formation on Earth.

Since 2015, they got a whole lot more data. The team is now certain “these unusual features really are volcanoes.” They don’t work like the one’s we’re used to though. “If you look at Mount Fuji from a distance or one of the Hawaiian volcanoes, they look like these big, broad, smooth features, which is just not what we see there. So, we think, probably the material is extruded from below, and the dome grows on top.

Pluto has things like ammonia or methanol acting as “antifreeze.” Even so, it “is still difficult to think that it would be liquid, because it’s just too cold – the average surface temperature on Pluto is about 40 Kelvin (-233 C),” said Singer. “So, it’s probably more, either slushy material, or it could even be mostly solid state – like a glacier is solid, but it can still flow.

What do you think?

Written by Staff Editor

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