18 Jul 2016

Ongoing geological activity on Pluto seen by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft could be caused by the partial freezing of a subsurface ocean that likely still exists today, according to research by Noah P. Hammond, and PSI Senior Scientist Amy C. Barr.
“Our model shows that recent geological activity on Pluto can be driven just from phase changes in the ice – no tides or exotic materials or unusual processes are required. If Pluto’s most recent tectonic episode is extensional, that means that Pluto may have an ocean at present. This lends support to the idea that oceans may be common among large Kuiper Belt objects, just as they are common among the satellites of the outer planets,” said Barr.

“We have been waiting a long time to see the surface of Pluto, and it did not disappoint,” Barr said. “Many people thought that Pluto would be geologically ‘dead,’ that it would be covered in craters and have an ancient surface. Our work shows how even Pluto, at the edge of the Solar System, with very little energy, can have tectonics. We are grateful to the New Horizons team for working so hard to guide the craft to Pluto and return the beautiful images that motivated our study. They have provided another piece in the puzzle of the comparative planetology of icy worlds.”

Image: An artist conception of NASA’s New Horizons Spacecraft.