New research about a crater discovered by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft suggests that a massive volcano on Pluto, similar in size to the one in Yellowstone National Park, might have erupted and released icy material on the surface of the dwarf planet around a few million years ago.
According to Space.com, scientists studying spacecraft data of an unusual crater near a bright, heart-shaped region on Pluto called Sputnik Planitia say they may have found a supervolcano that likely erupted just a few million years ago. That might sound like an incredibly long time ago, but cosmically speaking, it's pretty recent. For context, the solar system is more than 4.5 billion years old.
Instead of molten rock that blasts out of Earth's volcanoes, however, the 44-km-wide Kiladze crater appears to have spewed ice lava onto Pluto's surface in a process known as cryovolcanism. The process, which also unfolds on the moons of gas giants in our solar system and likely created other mystifying terrains on Pluto, is thought to have thrusted water from the world's hidden subsurface ocean onto its surface, reshaping it across millions of years.
Planetary scientist Dale Cruikshank and a group of colleagues have been studying a strange feature on Pluto called Kiladze Crater. Its existence raises a lot of questions about what's happening inside Pluto to create this weird landscape. The researchers recently released a paper exploring this region and offering an explanation for its appearance. The research has been published on the pre-print server arXiv.
According to Phys.org, the team strongly suggests that Kiladze is a super-cryovolcano. Cryovolcanism is the process that sends ice "lava" to the surface of Pluto. We've seen it across the outer solar system, on some of the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Like its "sister" form of volcanism here on Earth, some kind of heating melts mantle materials, which can eventually escape to the surface. We're used to seeing rocky lava. However, ice and water act as "lava," too, if conditions are just right.
