Pluto's “heart” is actually a shock crater

Billions of years ago, an object moving at tremendous speed crashed into Pluto and left an eternal reminder of itself on the planetoid - a crater 825 kilometers wide. But instead of turning into an ugly scar on the body of a dwarf planet, the crater transformed into an unusual object that reminds us, people, of an icy heart.



New data obtained from the space probe New Horizons, helped scientists to clarify the situation, and to understand what are some of the elements of the surface of Pluto. There are ice mountains, moving glaciers, and perhaps even cryovolcanoes.



In the pictures sent by the interplanetary station, scientists saw an unusual formation of a circular shape surrounding the western “ventricle” of the ice heart in a region known as the Tombaugh Regio.

')

Scientists after analyzing the images and discussing the findings came to the conclusion that this is part of an ancient impact crater. In this case, the crater is quite deep, its depth is 4 kilometers. By area, the crater occupies about a third of the surface of Pluto. Only the Caloris impact crater on Mercury, which also occupies about a third of the surface of this hot planet, can be comparable in size. If you compare with the Earth, then such a crater should be between Mexico and Canada, and between California and North Carolina, USA.



The Sputnik Planum ice field on Pluto is located within this impact crater. The region itself has about 4 billion years, but the ice field is much younger - only about 10 million years old. Impact crater has a really round shape, except for its southern edge.







The crater has become a kind of ice trap, a place where glaciers gather, and the ice here is very diverse in composition: here it is CO, nitrogen and methane. No here, it seems, only water ice, which on Pluto is a mountain-forming element.



Now scientists continue to study the cold "heart" of Pluto, trying to understand what exactly happened in this region billions of years ago.