Sputnik Planum is so young, and so smooth. The question is, how? (credit: NASA)
As we slide into another end-of-year holiday season, I’m thankful for a lot of things, from family and friends to a great new job at Ars. But I’m also thankful for New Horizons, the grand-piano-sized spacecraft that revealed Pluto to humanity for the first time this year. Anyone under about 45 years old, which narrowly includes me, largely missed the real-time excitement as the Voyager probes uncovered the solar system’s outer worlds in the 1980s.
And what a discovery Pluto proved to be. Far from a cold, dormant, cratered world at the edge of the solar system, Pluto dazzled with varied terrain and active geology. Perhaps most importantly, the tiny, almost-a-planet world reminded us all of what makes science so great, and so rewarding. First comes the joy of discovery, and then a realization that with new information comes a multiplicity of questions.
For Pluto that has meant finding a world with a surface that yet lives. Part of the left side of its “heart,” known as Sputnik Planum, appears to be less than 10 million years old. Scientists had no notion they would find this smooth feature before New Horizons arrived in July. Now they are left scrambling to understand how this could be.
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