It’s not just the air on Pluto that is cold — the volcanoes on the dwarf plant are frigid, too. According to a group of scientists on NASA’s New Horizons mission team, which recently turned up new discoveries about the “geological wonderland,” Pluto’s volcanoes don’t shoot out lava when they erupt. Instead, they launch large amounts of frozen water that may have the consistency of toothpaste.
The dwarf planet Pluto, which is smaller than Earth’s moon, orbits about 3.6 billion miles away from the sun, roughly 40 times farther away than the path of Earth’s orbit. The New Horizons probe, launched in 2006 before making it to Pluto in 2015, was sent to take photos of the far reaches of the known solar system as it flies deeper into outer space.
