Three months after the New Horizons spacecraft visited Pluto, the team has collected their first impressions in a paper for the journal Science.
Of course, we’ve already had plenty of news from the dwarf planet since the 14 July fly-by – about its ice mountains, its blue skies, and hints of windswept dunes and glacier-carved valleys. All in all, the emerging picture is one of Pluto being the Frankenstein’s monster of the outer solar system, with the terrain of many worlds hacked together into a jumbled whole.
The team’s first scientific paper reviews these discoveries and more, quantifying details ranging from the roundness of Pluto and its largest moon Charon – they’re very close to perfectly spherical – to the atmospheric pressure at its surface – a thousandth of 1 per cent of what we feel on Earth.
But some questions about how and why this weird world works as it does will take more time to answer. Here are the top five things we at New Scientist are hoping will eventually be revealed:
To read more, click here.