The Heart of Pluto

Since the cameras of NASA's New Horizons mission discovered a large heart-shaped structure on the surface of Pluto in 2015, that heart, that structure became the hallmark of the dwarf planet, however, what for us It is a beautiful image for scientists, it was somewhat puzzling how this geological structure was formed. To answer this question, scientists from the University of Bern in Switzerland and the University of Arizona in the United States have used numerical simulations and computers to investigate the origins of Sputnik Planitia, which is what the plain on the western part of the surface is called. from the heart of Pluto. A plain that is covered with a material that reflects more light than its surroundings, creating a whitish color. Sputnik Planitia covers an area approximately 1,200 km wide by about 2,000 km long, which is equivalent to a quarter of Europe or the United States. A surprising fact is that this region is about 4000 meters below most of Pluto.

The researchers who have done this work, the initial history of Pluto was marked by a cataclysmic event that formed Sputnik Planitia, they have calculated that this region was formed by the collision with an object, possibly a giant comet of around 640 km in diameter. , it is an enormous size for a comet, it was not a direct impact, the giant comet would have destroyed small Pluto if it had impacted directly, the elongated shape of Sputnik Planitia and its location on the equator suggest that the impact was an oblique collision and also At a relatively low speed, this meant that the core of the Giant Comet impactor did not sink towards Pluto's core but remained intact as a speck.

A low-speed impact of a comet 640 kilometers in diameter is something very strange. If it had been direct, it would have surely destroyed Pluto. An impact on Earth of that size would have caused a mass extinction, the entire Earth's crust would have melted; This impact at low speed is possible because far from the Sun in the distant solar system, the speeds are much slower, the objects go much more slowly than in the regions where the Earth is located, so the collisions are not as brutal. The team's findings have been published in the scientific journal Nature Astronomy and a detail that comes back to this research, since the existence of the nucleus of that giant comet under Sputnik Planitia means ruling out the idea that Pluto has an ocean of water Under its surface, as is the case with some icy moons, it is at least ruled out that a global subsurface ocean exists because researchers do not rule out that there may be some mass of water, although it would be much smaller.