Snow found on Pluto

Until now, almost all the news and articles about Pluto, which spoke about the landscape of the planetoid, implied various objects formed by ice (water, nitrogen, methane, etc.). There was no talk about snow as such, and they didn’t talk about mountains too much ...

But now scientists are talking about the possible discovery of these mountains, which are hidden under a layer of methane snow. This is a 420-km region of Cthulhu. This region has a reddish tint that is richer than the color of the adjacent areas. This shade is most likely due to the presence of Tolin . They are a mixture of various organic copolymers formed in the atmosphere from simple organic compounds, such as methane and ethane, under the action of ultraviolet radiation from the sun. Tolin is found on other planets and planets of the Solar System, including Titan.

High resolution images have shown that the mountains in the Cthulhu region, especially the highest of them, are characterized by increased brightness. The reason is light material that contrasts with the darker color of the surrounding surface. According to scientists, this material is methane snow.
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“The fact that this material covers only the upper slopes of the peaks may indicate that methane ice in the atmosphere of Pluto acts like water in the atmosphere of the Earth, condensing at high altitude,” says John Stanberry, a representative of the New Horizons team.

The resolution of the picture shown above is 680 meters per pixel. The real size of the region with photos is 450 * 225 kilometers. The picture was taken from a distance of 33900 kilometers from the surface of Pluto, approximately 45 minutes before the closest approach of the New Horizons apparatus to Pluto.