MIAMI. Pluto has ridges on its icy surface. It is one of the first revelations of high definition photographs sent from Wednesday NASA probe New Horizons, after its historic passage through the icy planet.
The mountains have an elevation of 3400 meters, the US space agency explained. This is almost the same altitude in the Bolivian city of La Paz.
The scientists also were amazed to see a region near Pluto that shows no sign of being hit by meteors, despite the dwarf planet lies in the chaotic Kuiper Belt, a region beyond Neptune filled with cosmic debris that constantly plague Pluto and its five moons.
NASA also reported that the findings made by New Horizons show that Pluto is geologically active and containing astronómicos- areas -in terms are quite young: perhaps less than 100 million years. This is just a fraction of the age of the Solar System, was born 4,500 million years ago.
“It could be active at this time,” he said John Spencer , one of the Project scientists. The first time scientists saw a geologically active phenomenon was Triton, a moon of Neptune examined by the Voyager 2 in the 80s and had virtually no meteorite impacts.
“Now that we have established that these small planets may be very active after a long time, I think many geophysical start from scratch to try to understand how exactly is this possible,” said principal investigator of the mission, Alan Stern .
El bedrock forming these mountains have to be made of H2O, water-ice, “Stern said. There are many other types of ice on the surface of Pluto, but are formed from nitrogen, methane and carbon monoxide. And “you can not make mountains from there. It would be too soft, “he said Spencer told reporters.
The unmanned probe New Horizons , for $ 700 million and the size of a piano, spent most of Tuesday taking photos and collecting data from Pluto, when it passed just 12,430 km from its surface. These images, including color data dwarf planet and some of its five moons, are ten times more detail than had been achieved so far.
But the information collected the ship is just beginning to reach Earth, after a voyage of nine years and 5,000 million kilometers. And the data will drip over the next 16 months, according to Stern.
Other images revealed on Wednesday showed that Charon, Pluto’s largest moon, has its own belt of valleys and mountains extending over 960 km above the surface.
“Charon made us hallucinate when we got the picture today,” he said project scientist attached, Cathy Olkin . “It’s a little full of deep canyons world, depressions, cliffs and dark areas are still a bit of a mystery to us.”
From the mission Voyager 2 of NASA, that grazed Neptune in 1989, no other ship had visited a planetary system.
And Pluto, which was considered by far the most distant planet from the sun until it was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006, never before had been explored
Previously, photos taken from the probe had revealed that the dwarf planet has a full of curiosities surface. from a dark picture whale-shaped to a bright clear silhouette that looks like a heart. But what else are these forms, or what type of terrain they represent, is still a mystery.
The images released on Wednesday, have a resolution of about 100 meters per pixel.
According John Grunsfeld , associate administrator of NASA’s science mission, details on Pluto has captured public attention because it reveals news about the origin of the earth and generates more questions, such as whether it is possible extraterrestrial life.
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