Planet, dwarf planet or the little world that could? One thing’s for sure: it’s the Frankenstein’s monster of the outer solar system, because Pluto looks like bits of different worlds stitched together.
Mountains like Earth’s, 3 kilometres high and made of frozen water. A comet’s tail of escaping gas pulled back by the solar wind. Smooth surfaces like the icy veneer of Neptune’s moon Triton next to cracked terrain that resembles the highlands of Mars.
This variation stunned researchers when NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft beamed back the first close-ups of Pluto and its moons last week. The dwarf planet is unlike any other world we’ve ever visited. So is its largest moon, Charon.
That surprise has turned even the most seasoned Pluto experts into wide-eyed surveyors, cataloguing the dwarf planet’s many mismatched oddities and trying to find the joins. The maps from New Horizons, which will be downloaded and analysed over the coming year, are already proving hard to interpret – and harder still to explain.
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