The furthest reaches of our solar system may hold the key to finding evidence of alien life. While it’s a long shot that life will actually resemble human life like you and I, a new study published in Nature Communications suggests Pluto has two ice volcanoes continuing to spew ice and frozen water across an area on the planet. The existence of ice volcanoes, scientists say, could mean there’s a potential heat source and, in turn, water somewhere beneath the dwarf planet’s surface.
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“There was no other areas on Pluto that look like this region,” researcher Kelsi Singer, the lead author of the study, said in a recent chat with Space.com. “And it’s totally unique in the solar system.”
The area in question is home to two large mounds, scientists have seen thanks to data captured by NASA’s New Horizons fly-by of the planet. Those mounds — Wright Mons and Piccard Mons — may be upwards of 2.5 to 4 miles high, each. In comparison, Mount Everest, the tallest summit on Earth, is roughly 5.4 miles tall.
Since the area where the two mounds were found has little to no impact craters, scientists believe they were formed from cryovolcanoes relatively recently in the timeline.
“It’s probably not coming up completely liquid — it’s probably more like a slushy thing where you have some liquid and some ice, or it could even be more like a flowing solid,” Singer added, suggesting the substance could have a consistency similar to that of “ketchup or silly putty.” “We all know that ice can flow because we have glaciers that flow on Earth.”
As with the search for life as we know it, scientists are always keen to find evidence of water that alien microbes could live in. The existence of ice, of course, means that water could be located somewhere on the planet. Even if that were case, Singer admits there’s an uphill battle to life actually being able to live on the planet.
“I think that it is a little more promising, and that there might be some heat and liquid, potentially liquid water closer to the surface,” Singer said. “But there’s still some big challenges for poor microbes that want to live on Pluto.”
Cover photo by HYPERSPHERE/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
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UNSPECIFIED: In this NASA digital illustration handout released on February 22, 2017, an artist's concept allows us to imagine what it would be like to stand on the surface of the exoplanet TRAPPIST-1f, located in the TRAPPIST-1 system in the constellation Aquarius. Because this planet is thought to be tidally locked to its star, meaning the same face of the planet is always pointed at the star, there would be a region called the terminator that perpetually divides day and night. If the night side is icy, the day side might give way to liquid water in the area where sufficient starlight hits the surface. One of the unusual features of TRAPPIST-1 planets is how close they are to each other — so close that other planets could be visible in the sky from the surface of each one. In this view, the planets in the sky correspond to TRAPPIST1e (top left crescent), d (middle crescent) and c (bright dot to the lower right of the crescents). TRAPPIST-1e would appear about the same size as the moon and TRAPPIST1-c is on the far side of the star. The star itself, an ultra-cool dwarf, would appear about three times larger than our own sun does in Earth's skies. The system has been revealed through observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope as well as other ground-based observatories, and the ground-based TRAPPIST telescope for which it was named after. (Photo digital Illustration by NASA/NASA via Getty Images)
