Pluto just got even weirder with this unprecedented photo of its north pole
Wow.
That's what we have to say about this incredible new photo of Pluto's north pole that NASA just released:
The New Horizons spacecraft took this high-resolution shot as it approached the icy world on July 14, 2015.
We're only seeing it now because the robot has a small antenna and is speeding away from our solar system at about 32,000 mph. In fact, it could take until the end of 2016 to transmit all of the photos it took before, during, and after its fly-by.
But this photo isn't just pretty. It's revealing more weird truths about little ol' Pluto, which is technically classified as a dwarf planet - not a full-on planet, like Earth or diminutive Mercury. (Alan Stern, New Horizons' lead scientist, calls this demotion "bulls--t.")
"Pluto's north pole is criss-crossed by crazy rugged canyons and is covered in heavy methane snows," Stern told Tech Insider in an email. "The color of the snow varies from a yellowy hue near the pole to lighter grey-blue away from it."
The yellow tint on the surface (note: not NASA's highlighting) might indicate older methane snow that's been pummeled over the millennia by solar and cosmic radiation. The blue-gray color might be younger methane snow that's seen less exposure.
To see what Stern is referring to, let's zoom in to the top-left part of the north pole:
You can really start to make out those crazy canyons, craters, plateaus, and shades of radiation-blasted methane snow.
In fact, NASA says these kinds of features are so unusual they are "not seen elsewhere on Pluto."
The space agency provided this highlighted version to mark a few things they see as rather odd:
The green squiggly lines to the east and the west of Pluto's north pole are narrow canyons. That yellow patch is a very large canyon, at 45 miles wide, with a "winding valley" running through the middle (shown in blue).
NASA notes the walls of these gullies are very crumbled and degraded, which suggests they're incredibly ancient - unlike many larger patches of Pluto, which are "younger" and thought to be about 10 million years old. (NASA hasn't yet estimated how old the features are that it highlighted.)
Contrast that to the Grand Canyon, a geologic feature on a very dynamic planet (aka Earth) that is somewhere between 6 million and 70 million years old.
So what does it all mean?
Primarily, that Pluto is getting weirder with each new photo scientists glimpse.
For one, it has a strange mix of very ancient and also very young features. Second, it's not some static frozen ice ball; it was and possibly still is a very active, dynamic place. The canyons, for example, may have been formed by tectonic plate-like movement millions of years ago.
There's also this, Stern wrote: "Buried in those polar images are bound to be clues to Pluto's past climates!" Basically, Pluto may have also had a very busy atmosphere - even though its very thin and wispy right now.
That's pretty dynamic for a tiny planet that's minus-387 degrees Celsius and has no running water or other liquid.
We can't wait to see what else New Horizons' photos of Pluto reveal as they're beamed back to Earth.
And we're also looking forward to the spacecraft's next never-before-visited target: a tiny frozen rock in the Kuiper Belt called 2014 MU69. It's so ancient, it might represent some of the solar system's earliest building materials from 4.6 billion years ago.
