Image courtesy of NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
Joel Kontinen
When NASA’s New
Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto in July 2015, scientists were expecting to
see a dwarf planet that looked old and its largest moon Charon to be full of
impact craters.
However, what they
saw blew their socks off, as NASA researcher Cathy Olkin put
it in a New Horizons press conference.
Pluto looked far too young to fit into a 4.6
billion year old universe, and so did Charon.
Subsequent images sent by New Horizons
showed more evidence for youth.
Scientist have proposed two interpretations of a cold Pluto. ”The first which involves Pluto forming over millions of years by the slow accretion of cold objects. This version of Pluto eventually would have coalesced enough material that radiative heating from the inside would melt the subsurface ocean. The other hypothesis involves a “warm” or “hot” Pluto, in which Pluto formed over a shorter time period in violent collisions that heated its interior, formed the ocean, and eventually cooled the planet into the majority ice ball we know today. "
Anyhow, Pluto is just cold but its geography tells it is young.
Source:
Wendel, JoAnna, 2022, Clues to Pluto’s History Lie in Its Faults Phys. org. 1 February.
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