Liquid may have flowed recently on the dwarf planet Pluto: a new study finds signs that liquid nitrogen is rising through cracks at the northern edge of Sputnik Planitia – the vast heart-shaped glacier.
The find
Images from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft from 2015 and 2016 show city-sized convection cells in the north of Sputnik Planitia, separated by thin, dark lines. New analyses suggest these dark streaks are occasionally “wetted” – most likely by liquid nitrogen. It would be the first evidence of recently flowing liquid on Pluto’s surface.
A puzzle
Pluto’s icy conditions make nitrogen “rain” essentially impossible. Yet the dark patterns resemble glacial structures on Earth that have been wetted by water. The study comes from the Southwest Research Institute, led by Alan Stern, the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission. Sputnik Planitia, a frozen nitrogen glacier, is larger than Texas and Oklahoma combined.
