FRANCE: The informally named feature Wright Mons, located south of Sputnik Planum on Pluto, is an unusual feature that’s about 100 miles (160 kilometers) wide and 13,000 feet (4 kilometers) high. It displays a summit depression (visible in the center of the image) that’s approximately 35 miles (56 kilometers) across, with a distinctive hummocky texture on its sides. The rim of the summit depression also shows concentric fracturing. New Horizons scientists believe that this mountain and another, Piccard Mons, could have been formed by the ‘cryovolcanic’ eruption of ices from beneath Pluto’s surface. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
Topographic maps of Pluto charted using data from NASA’s New Horizons mission appear to show two huge mountains scientists said Monday could be ice volcanoes, a discovery that would set the distant dwarf planet apart from its neighbors in the outer solar system.
Two sprawling mountain peaks, each about 100 miles across and several miles high, have deep depressions carved from their centers, a telltale marker of a volcano, at least on more familiar geologically active worlds closer to the sun.
“Whatever they are, they’re definitely weird, and volcanoes is maybe the least weird hypothesis at the moment,” said Oliver White, a scientist on the New horizons team from NASA’s Ames Research Center.
But Pluto itself is an enigma.
Geologists did not expect to see apparent glacial ice flows, and scientists are making unexpected findings about Pluto’s tenuous atmosphere. With the discovery that Pluto is geologically alive, more signs are pointing toward the presence of volcanic activity.
