[NTD, Beijing, April 3, 2022]Scientists have recently discovered multiple giant ice volcanoes in pictures of Pluto, and they are likely to have erupted in recent times.
The findings were published in a study published March 29 in the journal Nature Communications. “This region looks very different from other regions on Pluto,” Kelsi Singer, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, one of the principal investigators, told space.com The entire solar system is also a very unique region.”
Pluto was originally the ninth largest planet in the solar system, but in 2005 the International Astronomical Union (IAU) redefined the planet, and Pluto was excluded and classified as a “dwarf planet”.
When scientists recently analyzed photos taken by NASA’s New Horizons during a close flyby of Pluto in July 2015, they found that the two peaks above are very special and are likely to be ice volcanoes filled with ice, snow and mud. New research finally confirms this speculation.
Ordinary volcanoes erupt with hot magma, while ice volcanoes erupt with a mixture of ice slag and compounds such as ammonia and methane. Scientists have been looking for evidence of ice volcanoes on cooler bodies in the solar system, such as the dwarf planet Ceres and Titan, the largest moon around Saturn.
Pluto is located on the edge of the Kuiper Belt in the solar system, where the average temperature is minus 232 degrees Celsius. If there are ice volcanoes there, their eruptions are likely to remain there in their original form.
Singer told CNN: “The erupted icy material was likely a mixture of ice and water, like toothpaste, gushing out of a volcanic pipe and erupting onto Pluto’s ground. Because Pluto’s ground temperature is too low, liquid water cannot exist. Too long. Most of the time, these eruptions piled up on the surface, creating the massive hemispheres or bulges we see in the region today.”
Impact craters are common elsewhere on Pluto, and no impact craters are seen in this ice-volcanic region. This shows that these ice volcanoes may have erupted about 100 million to 200 million years ago, and they will erupt again in the future. “It’s like a volcano on Earth, after a period of dormancy, it erupts again,” Singer told CNN.
Scientists know that Pluto has had subsurface oceans before. Now that evidence of recent eruptions of ice volcanoes has been found, the researchers believe that this shows that Pluto’s underground still has liquid water resources to supply these volcanoes, and it also shows that there are more geothermal resources inside Pluto. These geothermal resources may come from the decay of radioactive elements inside Pluto.
Since Pluto may have a subterranean ocean, the researchers say this suggests that life may also exist on Pluto.
(Transfer from The Epoch Times/Editor-in-charge: Ye Ping)
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