Archive for 2015 / November / 10

Pluto’s unexpected surface and moons

The New Horizons mission team reported several unusual findings concerning Pluto this week at the 47th Annual Meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) of the American Astronomical Society (AAS).  Among the biggest was the discovery of two large and distinct mountains that New Horizons geologists think could be recently active “cryovolcanoes”.  So-called cryovolcanoes are thought to spew a semi-frozen slurry of water ice, nitrogen or other gases instead of fire, smoke and lava […]