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Pluto has 'floating hills'
Story highlights
- NASA finds miles of floating hills on Pluto
- Movement of the icy formations are similar to Earth's icebergs
(CNN)Pluto's icy wonderland keeps mystifying scientists.
On Thursday, NASA released a photo
of what they are calling Pluto's "floating hills." The images were
captured by New Horizons spacecraft during its historic 2015 fly by.
The
hill clusters lie in a vast ice plain inside the dwarf planet's "heart"
region. It's believed that the frozen formations stretch for miles.
Experts at NASA theorize that the mysterious floating hills are
fragments of water ice that resemble giant glaciers, similar to the
icebergs we see on Earth.
Since water ice is lighter
than nitrogen ice, the hills are floating above a sea of nitrogen. These
huge chucks of water ice move much like the icebergs that float in
Earth's Arctic Ocean, NASA scientists said in a statement.
It's
likely that the floating hills are fragmented water ice that have
broken away from the rugged uplands and are gliding towards the Sputnik
Planum.
This photo comes after NASA announced in January
that the dwarf planet is covered with way more water ice than the
American space agency initially expected. The water ice discovery came
after NASA stitched together two infrared images taken by New Horizons.
Since it's initial flyby, the images captured by New Horizons continue to reveal new characteristics about the dwarf planet.
The
floating hills are joining Pluto's already fascinating geographic
activity from its towering ice mountains to its potential ice volcanoes.
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