Many had expected Pluto to be a world frozen in icy cold — after all, it’s more than 30 times farther from the Sun than Earth. Only little light and heat from the sun reaches it. A team led by planetary scientist Kelsi Singer from Boulder, Colorado, reports that there could still be volcanism on Pluto today. However, it is not lava that swells from the inside, but rather ice slush made of water and nitrogen.
Some areas of Pluto are dotted with countless craters, while other areas are nearly smooth with very few impacts. The scarred areas may not have changed for billions of years – they still show all the traces of the impacted cosmic chunks. Smooth terrain, on the other hand, is geologically very young, at most about a hundred million years old. Apparently slush that has oozed out has washed over the old craters.
Kelsi Singer and her team have discovered seven kilometers of soaring mountains they believe to be ice volcanoes that may still be active today. However, it is unclear where Pluto – which is a third smaller than our moon – gets the energy for this. Either it’s still holding the heat of its birth inside, or it has an unknown heat source.