NASA's New Horizons science team has discovered that Pluto contains what it believes are ice volcanoes, and is orbited by moons that behave unlike any other in the solar system.

"The New Horizons mission has taken what we thought we knew about Pluto and turned it upside down," said Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA Headquarters in Washington, in a statement. "It's why we explore -- to satisfy our innate curiosity and answer deeper questions about how we got here and what lies beyond the next horizon."

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The discoveries were revealed at the 47th annual Meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences being held this week in National Harbor, Md.

New Horizons geologists used images of Pluto's surface to make 3-D maps that show that two of Pluto's largest mountains could be cryovolcanoes, which are ice volcanoes that may have been active in the recent geological past.

"It's hard to imagine how rapidly our view of Pluto and its moons are evolving as new data stream in each week," said mission Principal Investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. "As the discoveries pour in from those data, Pluto is becoming a star of the solar system ... I'd wager that for most planetary scientists, any one or two of our latest major findings on one world would be considered astounding. To have them all is simply incredible."

The two possible cryovolcanos measure tens of miles across, and several miles high.

"These are big mountains with a large hole in their summit, and on Earth that generally means one thing -- a volcano," said Oliver White, New Horizons postdoctoral researcher at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. "If they are volcanic, then the summit depression would likely have formed via collapse as material is erupted from underneath." 

Unlike volcanoes on Earth that spew molten rock, ice volcanoes on Pluto likely emit a somewhat melted slurry of substances such as water ice, nitrogen, ammonia, or methane. NASA says that f Pluto proves to have volcanoes, it will provide an iimportant new clue to its geologic and atmospheric evolution.

"Nothing like this has been seen in the deep outer solar system," said Jeffrey Moore, New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team leader, at Ames.

The New Horizons mission also revealed that while nearly every moon in our solar system, including Earth's, is in synchronous rotation, keeping one face toward the planet. This is not the case for Pluto's small moons.

"Pluto's moons behave like spinning tops," said co-investigator Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. "We suspect from this that Pluto had more moons in the past."

TagsNASA Finds Ice Volcanoes, Twirling Moons on Pluto, cryovolcanoes, New Horizons, Jim Green, Meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences, Southwest Research Institute