Pluto's Hidden Ice Volcanoes Hint at the Possibility of Life

The discovery suggests the dwarf planet may be harboring a subsurface liquid ocean

Corryn Wetzel
Daily Correspondent

March 31, 2022



Pluto's icy volcanic region, with possible past eruptions marked in blue. NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/Isaac Herrera/Kelsi Singer


Images of Pluto's surface have revealed the dwarf planet's hidden secret: a network of giant ice volcanoes. According to astronomers behind the discovery published this week in Nature Communications, the volcanoes appear to have erupted in an icy slush relatively recently.

"There was no other areas on Pluto that look like this region," says study author Kelsi Singer, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, told Space’s Rebecca Sohn. "It's totally unique in the solar system."

The peaks were first spotted by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, which snapped photos of the dwarf planet’s surface and its moons during a flyby in July 2015. New Horizon’s images allow astronomers to take a closer look at Pluto than ever before, which led them to pinpoint an area with two towering peaks suspected to be ice-filled volcanoes. Now, scientists say they’ve found evidence of erupted ice lava in the images, an indication that Pluto’s dramatic peaks are, in fact, a collection of icy volcanoes.

“We tried to find some other way to explain it, but we just really couldn’t,” Singer tells Robin George Andrews for the New York Times.

More:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/plutos-hidden-ice-volcanoes-hint-at-the-possibility-of-life-180979839/