Pluto Is Messier Than We Thought! Scientists Find Giant Ice Avalanches on the Dwarf Planet
Quick Summary
Scientists just found something surprising hiding in old photos of Pluto: giant landslides made of ice! Using pictures from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, researchers spotted six massive avalanches inside craters on the dwarf planet. The largest one is big enough to bury the entire island of Manhattan!
What Happened?
Back in July 2015, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft zoomed past Pluto — the first time any spacecraft had ever visited it. The probe snapped thousands of photos as it flew by at tremendous speed.
For years, scientists have been going back and studying those old photos very carefully. Now, a team of researchers led by geologist Marco Emanuele Discenza has spotted something that no one confirmed before: landslides on Pluto.
A landslide happens when a big chunk of rock, ice, or soil breaks loose and slides downhill. On Earth, landslides happen all the time after earthquakes or heavy rain. They had also been found on Mars and other places in our solar system. But on Pluto? No one had proven it — until now.
The scientists found six landslides hiding inside three impact craters near Pluto’s famous heart-shaped region, called Sputnik Planitia. The craters’ steep inner walls had collapsed, sending huge blocks of ice and debris tumbling to the crater floors below.
The largest of the six landslides covers an area of about 130 square kilometers. That is roughly twice the size of Manhattan island in New York City. The slides dropped between 1 and 1.4 miles down the crater walls before spreading up to 9 miles across the crater floor below.
Pluto’s gravity is much weaker than Earth’s — if you weighed 100 pounds here, you’d weigh less than 7 pounds on Pluto. But even that tiny pull was enough to send huge walls of ice crashing down.
Why Does It Matter?
For a long time, many scientists thought of Pluto as a cold, quiet, frozen ball in the far reaches of our solar system. But discoveries like this keep showing that Pluto is more active and interesting than anyone expected. It has nitrogen ice glaciers, towering water-ice mountains, and now confirmed landslides.
The team published their findings in the science journal Icarus. They believe Pluto probably has many more hidden landslides that future missions with better cameras could find. These discoveries help scientists understand how all icy worlds in our solar system — including moons and distant objects in the Kuiper Belt — change and evolve over billions of years.
Big Words
- Landslide — when a mass of rock, ice, or soil suddenly slides downhill under the pull of gravity
- Dwarf planet — a world that orbits the Sun and is round, but shares its neighborhood with other objects (like Pluto!)
- Crater — a bowl-shaped hole in the ground usually made by a space rock smashing into a surface
- Kuiper Belt — a region far beyond Neptune in our solar system, filled with icy objects including Pluto
- Sputnik Planitia — Pluto’s famous heart-shaped plain made of nitrogen ice, one of the most recognizable features in the solar system
Fun Fact
The New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto so fast that its closest approach lasted only about 30 minutes — yet the photos it took that day are still revealing brand-new secrets 11 years later!
Think About It
Pluto is so far away that even light takes over five hours to travel from the Sun to Pluto. What kind of spacecraft would YOU design to explore Pluto up close?
Sources
- Phys.org — Six massive landslides discovered on icy Pluto
- Science News — Pluto has landslides
- Gizmodo — 11 Years After Historic Flyby, Scientists Discover Giant Landslides on Pluto
- Space.com — Astronomers discover landslides on Pluto large enough to bury entire cities
- ScienceDirect / Icarus journal — First geomorphological evidence of landslides on Pluto