This July, NASA's New Horizons space probe blasted by Pluto and its moons, the culmination of a 9-year flight that marked humanity's first visit to the former ninth planet and its companions. Since then, we've been reaping the astonishing benefits of that daring trip. Today the scientists behind the New Horizons mission just published their first overview of what they found on Pluto, in a report in the journal Science. As the full report makes clear, Pluto and its moons are far more fascinating and mysterious than anybody had imagined.

Pluto and its largest moon Charon are "two of the most complex bodies in our solar system, rivaling the Earth and Marsin terms of the crazy amount of diversity in their geological landforms," says Alan Stern, the head of the New Horizons mission. In addition, the scientists have also announced evidence that both are far from the stagnant, dead worlds we once believed them to be. "We have plenty of evidence of glacial floes and other tectonic features that clearly indicated these bodies have been geologically active on the inside, very recently."

"It's just further proof that nature is spectacular and spectacularly surprising."

This discovery that Pluto and Charon are geologically active is frankly stunning, Stern says. "Our best understanding is that a [dwarf] planet like Pluto, after 4.5 billion years of cooling, should not be active," he says, "We really don't understand why or how. This is a huge paradigm shift that's violating our knowledge of all planets. There's clearly something missing in our thinking, and its sending geophysicists back to the drawing-board."

"The New Horizon's mission is paying off, but my brain hurts," Stern adds.

Charon NASA

The proof is written across the face of both worlds. In NASA's now-famous picture of Pluto's heart-shaped geological feature, Stern points to the curiously smooth left lobe of the heart, which the scientists have preliminarily named Sputnik Planum, or SP. "SP is about the size of Texas, and unlike the rest of Pluto, there's not a single crater on it," Stern says. That means it must be active, or you'd see the area pockmarked. Plus, the NASA scientists have also found "evidence of tectonics, glacial floes where ice has run out of the mountains, and places ice is swirling around obstacles"—all of which points to geologically recent activity, Stern says.

New Horizons uncovered a swath of secondary mysteries to boot. Two of Pluto's smaller satellites, Nix and Hydra, are curiously reflective, almost twice as shiny as ice-glazed Charon. No one knows why. And Pluto's layered atmosphere, which is made up "of many layers of haze, which include some exotic molecules like acetylene and ethylene, are much higher than many people even thought possible," Stern says. As a result of the extra-high haze layers, Stern says, more light was reflected on Pluto's dark side than the scientists expected. That illuminated parts of Pluto that the researchers were almost sure would be hidden in darkness. The scientists also put together a preliminary identification of the geological makeup across Pluto's icy-surface, and detected the existence of a firm layer of ice-bedrock.

Perhaps the best part about the new study, and certainly the geekiest is the preliminary names for the various features on Pluto and Charon. Beyond the names referencing famous explorers, spacecraft, and scientists, the icy bodies have Kirk, Spock, and Uhura craters. Also Vader, Skywalker, and (Leia) Organa craters. There are Tardis and Serenity chasms. A Mordor and Cthulhu regio. And my personal favorite, the Balrog Macula. A full list can be found at NASA's OurPluto.org.

Even now, NASA has downloaded only about 15 percent of the total data collected in the flyby. Stern says that his fellow scientists likely won't have solid answers for the various mysteries Pluto and Charon pose until 2017 at the very earliest, a year after the New Horizon's data download has finished. Still, for Stern the takeaway is clear: "It's just further proof that nature is spectacular and spectacularly surprising. [Exploring] the Pluto system is not only enchanting and beautiful, it's also teaching us lessons about how things work in the universe that we could have never predicted."

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