The New Horizon spacecraft has captured images of giant icebergs on the minor planet Pluto. Corresponding photos and videos are currently being admired on Twitter.
The footage is new. It has been known for a long time that there are icebergs on Pluto. The specialist magazine reported back in May Nature Communications from the seven kilometers high and up to 150 kilometers wide icebergs. Accordingly, it is a special form of volcanism in which viscous water ice must have escaped from the interior of Pluto in the recent past.
Ice volcanoes on Pluto: Icy material is ejected instead of lava
The scientists assume that the ice volcanoes are young in cosmic terms. According to the discoverers, an age of a few 100 million years is realistic. Pluto itself is about 4.5 billion years old.
As the online portal research and knowledge writes on the subject, this so-called cryovolcanism, in which icy material is ejected instead of hot molten rock, also occurs on different moons of the planets Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune. However, the dome-shaped structure and size of the ice volcanoes are so far unique in space.