Wright Mons is one of two suspected volcanoes found on Pluto. (credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI)
Before the New Horizons spacecraft zipped past Pluto four months ago, planetary scientists weren’t sure what they were going to find at the tiny, distant world. But they did not expect to discover active volcanoes. And yet that's precisely what scientists appear to have found after combining images with topography data.
“When you see a mountain with a big hole in the top of it, that basically points to one thing,” said Oliver White, a volcano expert at NASA’s Ames Research Center. “While it's crazy, it's the least crazy idea we can think of to explain what we see.”
White joined other scientists on the New Horizons team Monday presenting dozens of new findings at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences in National Harbor, Maryland. During a news conference, scientists delved into the chaotic nature of Pluto’s system of small moons, its curious atmosphere, and other tidbits. But the likelihood of cryovolcanoes that are still remaking the surface of Pluto stole the show.
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