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| An overhead view of Wright Mons, one of two potential cryovolcanoes on Pluto. NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI |
Two icy volcanoes may lurk near Pluto’s south pole, images from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft suggest.
The images show two mountains roughly circular in shape and with deep depressions in their centers. One, Wright Mons, is 3 to 5 kilometres high, while the other, Piccard Mons, is up to 6 kilometres high.
They resemble icy volcanoes, known as cryovolcanoes, on Neptune’s moon Triton and other frozen worlds. Flowing ice, rather than hot lava, fuels cryovolcanoes.
“We’re not yet ready to announce we have found volcanic constructs at Pluto, but these sure look suspicious and we’re looking at them very closely,” says Jeff Moore, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, who heads the New Horizons geology team. Moore spoke on November 9 at the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences meeting in National Harbor, Maryland.
Scientific American:
Ice Volcanoes Could Be on Pluto, Alexandra Witze and Nature magazine
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