(WGNO) – New sights of Pluto and its moons continue to get beamed back to earth by the new horizons spacecraft. Yesterday we saw what was up until then, the clearest view yet of the dwarf planet on the edge of our solar system.
Today, the resolution is even more magnificent. Zooming in we can see individual features and shapes are now discernible. Mountains come into sharp relief, towering over 11,000 feet above the surface. To put that into perspective, these mountains are comparable to those found in the Rocky Mountains.
What surprised scientists the most though, was how relatively smooth the surface is. As of yet, they haven’t found any impact craters which given the region of the solar system Pluto is in, means that it is 100 million years old or less. Sounds like a long time, but in planetary terms, Pluto is just an infant compared to the 4.5 billion years earth has been around.