The image has been taken by the New Horizons probe during its flyby in front of the "dwarf planet" , as it has been collected on the SINC platform. "We have the first samples of the scientific treasure collected during these critical moments, and I can tell you that it far exceeds our high expectations generated over the last few years," says John Grunsfeld, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate.
The mountains on Pluto probably formed no more than 100 million years ago, so experts suspect that they are very young in a 4.56 billion-year-old solar system. This reveals that the region pictured, which makes up about 1% of Pluto's surface, " may still be geologically active, " the scientists say.
"This is one of the youngest surfaces we have seen in the solar system ," said Jeff Moore, from the New Horizons Geological and Geophysical Imaging (GGI) team at NASA's Ames Research Center in California. .
What has most caught the attention of experts is that, unlike the icy moons of giant planets, Pluto cannot be heated by gravitational interactions with a much larger planetary body. For this reason, they think that “ some other process must be generating the mountainous landscape of the little 'planet '”.
