Pluto has a heart. Scientists discovered that its bleeding.
NASA's New Horizons mission reveals evidence that liquid nitrogen may be seeping out of Pluto’s giant heart-shaped glacier.
Scientists have discovered that Pluto's iconic heart-shaped glacier may be bleeding liquid onto its surface. This startling revelation comes from new research conducted after NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto in 2015. The heart-shaped glacier, known as Sputnik Planitia, is a vast basin filled with frozen nitrogen, larger than Texas and Oklahoma combined.
The dark streaks and patches visible on the glacier's rim are actually stains left by liquid nitrogen that has seeped through cracks, flowed, and refroze. Alan Stern, the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission, stated that this discovery suggests Pluto is more alive than it appears and hints at a new kind of time-variable feature on the dwarf planet.
While this activity is likely to have occurred within the last million years, it could still be ongoing today. This finding challenges the notion of Pluto as a frozen, dead world and adds to the growing list of unique terrains found on Pluto, a dwarf planet that continues to surprise scientists with its dynamic and intriguing features.
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