New released close-up photos of Pluto’s surface have baffled scientists due to their complexity and implication.
Taken from NASA’s New Horizon spacecraft, the images reveal mountains, what appears to be dunes, as well as multiple layers of haze on the dwarf planet, according to NewsGram.
“Pluto is showing us a diversity of land forms and complexity of processes that rival anything we have seen in the solar system,” said New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern.
The new images of Pluto’s surface reveal a more diverse landscape than scientists had previously imagined. One picture shows dark ancient craters bordering geologically younger ice plains. Scientists have speculated that dark ridges visible in the images may be dunes.
"Seeing dunes on Pluto - if that is what they are - would be completely wild, because Pluto's atmosphere today is so thin," said William McKinnon, an outer solar-system geologists on the New Horizons team, according to an RT report. "Either Pluto had a thicker atmosphere in the past, or some process we haven't figured out is at work. It's a head-scratcher."
New Horizons, which began its historic journey to Pluto in 2006, has taken nearly a decade to reach it, covering 3 billion miles along the way. Earlier this week New Horizons undertook flybys of the dwarf planet for the first time, sending back high-resolution images of Pluto and of its largest moon, Charon, to Earth for the first time.