The ‘significant finding’ comes after the New Horizons spacecraft took new pictures of the planet last week, giving us a much better insight into what life is like on the frozen world on the outskirts of the solar system.
Most people think that Earth was the only blue planet, but apparently the way Pluto’s atmosphere reacts to sunlight is similar to what happens here. The colour of the sky comes from UV sunlight scattering when it hits particles in the atmosphere, with a blue sky arising when those particles are very small.
In a second significant finding, New Horizons has detected small, exposed regions of water ice on Pluto, just days after NASA discovered salt deposits believed to be from flowing water on Mars.
‘Large expanses of Pluto don’t show exposed water ice,’ science team member Jason Cook said, ‘because it’s apparently masked by other, more volatile ices across most of the planet. Understanding why water appears exactly where it does, and not in other places, is a challenge that we are digging into.’
At the moment the New Horizons spacecraft is 3.1 billion miles from Earth, with all systems healthy and operating normally.
