Turns out Pluto is home to some big-ass ice-covered volcanoes, which once barfed out liquid space slush. Photo: NASA
In the proverbial manhood measuring contest of our solar system, Pluto is as far from the winner as it is from the sun. The tiny planet (or dwarf planet or asteroid or whatever) is like the prepubescent boy of the solar system while, say, Jupiter is like the Ron Jeremy. But what it lacks in overall size, Pluto is slowly but surely making up for in cosmic curiosities, giving hope to growers-not-showers everywhere.
A recent report from NASA says that the New Horizons spacecraft zoomed Pluto last July and found some massive land features as seen by geothermal snapshots. The photos show possible ice volcanoes (or cyrovolcanoes), which may have only recently ceased to spew space slush, that tower as high as earth’s largest peaks.
The two seen in the photo above, named Wright Mons and Piccard Mons, are 2 and 3.5 miles high, respectively. Those heights rival even Earth’s most treacherous and towering precipice, Mt. Everest. And the smaller of the two has an opening of about 35 miles wide. For southern Californians, that’s a few miles further than Catalina Island.
“The New Horizons mission has taken what we thought we knew about Pluto and turned it upside down,” said Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA Headquarters in Washington in a press release. “It’s why we explore – to satisfy our innate curiosity and answer deeper questions about how we got here and what lies beyond the next horizon.”
Aside from being valuable information about a distant world and solidifying man’s scientific grasp of the universe, this is HUGE news for Pluto. Now they have some ammo to fire at the other larger, much more endowed planets. If anything, it’s a confidence booster…and Pluto needed it after that whole “not a real planet” thing.
This adds credence to the age old planetary saying: It’s not the size of the planet that matters, but how you…spew gaseous, half-frozen space liquid from it via gigantic ice volcanoes.
