When New Horizons flew by Pluto, the dwarf planet’s bright heart-shaped glacier at Sputnik Planitia garnered much attention. Now scientists think they’ve found evidence that liquid has flowed recently there. In a new study, they argue that dark regions near the glacier’s edge are likely places where liquid nitrogen flows up through the nitrogen ice and spreads in a magma-like process.
At Pluto’s conditions, liquid nitrogen is less dense than its solid form (unlike on Earth), so any melted liquid from the glacier works its way toward the surface. That would happen through faults and cracks, the same way that buoyant magma rises through the Earth’s crust.
The team broke this trek down step-by-step and analyzed how nitrogen could melt in the first place, how it would rise and flow at the surface, and how long it would take for the liquid to re-freeze. They concluded that this cryovolcanism is plausible and may occur not just on Pluto but on other cold worlds like Triton and Eris. (Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/SwRI; research credit: S. Stern et al.; via Gizmodo)
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