A suspected subsurface ocean on Pluto might be old and deep.
New analyses of images from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft suggest that the dwarf planet has had an underground ocean since shortly after Pluto formed 4.5 billion years ago, and that the ocean may surround and interact with the rocky core.
If so, oceans could be common at the solar system’s edge — and may even be able to support life. That possibly “transforms the way we think about the Kuiper Belt,” the region of icy objects beyond the orbit of Neptune (SN: 3/27/19), says planetary scientist Adeene Denton of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.
On its pass through the Kuiper Belt in 2015, New Horizons revealed that despite the dwarf planet’s location nearly 6 billion kilometers from the sun, Pluto showed signs of hosting an ocean of liquid water beneath an icy shell (SN: 9/23/16).
How much liquid may lie beneath Pluto’s ground, how long it’s been there, and how much the water may have partially frozen over time is hard to tell from the surface. The new research, which had been scheduled for presentation the week of March 16 at the canceled Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas, has dug into those questions.
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