Our Earth has always been the centre of attention as it's actually the best planet ! We started digging up some information about planets which were around Earth like Mars, Saturn, Jupiter and many more. Although more is unknown than known! There was one planet always known as the dark, cold and mysterious one. This is the edge of our solar system. It is cold and uninhabitable and hurtling through this void is Pluto which has not caught the attention of the humans on earth yet!
Although some years back it did, when NASA’s New Horizons flew past Pluto on 14th July 2015, it discovered a world unlike any we had seen before. It had mountains made of solid water ice (with caps of methane snow) and vast smooth glacier-like plains of nitrogen ice and now after 7 years in 2022 we saw ten ice volcanoes also called cryovolcanoes on the surface of Pluto each almost 7 kilometres tall which was unique. Our volcanoes are hot and smoldering, made up of gas and molten rocks but nothing like on pluto, the ice volcanoes are made by frozen liquids like ammonia and water. With its youngest and most recent one being only 100 to 200 million years old, which is very young as Pluto itself was formed about 4 billion years ago. Although right now there are many questions going on in everyone's mind like how can pluto “THE ICY WORLD” keep volcanoes brewing, as Pluto’s temperature is about -232 degree celsius which is too low for a volcanic activity to take place, unless we are wrong about Pluto’s temperature at its core! Scientists said that Pluto's volcanoes were formed by frozen liquid so does that mean Pluto had oceans before?
All these questions and possibilities have intrigued scientists to know where it leads, volcanoes mean warmth and this might lead to a possibility of Pluto having warm water under it. Pluto, which was once called dark and cold, and was skirting along the edges of the solar system, very tiny compared to other planets and left alone might have a possibility of holding a place in the field of science.
Images of Ice volcanoes spotted on Pluto by NASA
Sources
-GRAVITAS
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