NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has spotted a strange landscape on Pluto, one marked by a pebbly and scaly terrain that resembles snakeskin. The terrain, located on the eastern side of Pluto's famous "heart," was caught during the probe's flyby of the dwarf planet last July, and scientists now claim that it may be composed of materials that predate the solar system's birth.
The unique "scales" are dense minimountians approximately 1,650 feet tall, according to computer models created by the New Horizons team.
"Their relative spacing of about 3-5 kilometers [1.9 to 3.1 miles] makes them some of the steepest features seen on Pluto," said Orkan Umurhan, a member of the team.
The snakeskin region, informally named the Tartarus Dorsa, is made up largely of methane and smaller amounts of water, meaning that the scaly peaks are likely composed of pure methane ice or methane clathrate ice - methane molecules "caged" inside of water molecules.
There are currently only two known studies that examine the ability of pure methane ice to maintain steep slopes like those seen in the snakeskin region over a long period of time, and the findings of both are ambiguous. One study found that pure methane is too mushy to accomplish such a feat, while the other claimed that methane could maintain such slopes, but only if its individual crystals were large enough.
However, if the slopes are made up of methane clathrates - which are also present on Earth at the bottom of deep oceans - the implications would be interesting. Umurhan suggests that the presence of clathrates in Pluto's unique terrain would point to it being made up of some of the oldest materials in our solar system.
Umurhan claims that recent studies "strongly suggest that methane clathrates in the icy moons of the outer solar system and also in the Kuiper Belt were formed way back before the solar system formed - i.e., within the protosolar nebula - potentially making them probably some of the oldest materials in our solar system."
"Might the material comprising the bladed terrain of Tartarus Dorsa be a record of a time before the solar system ever was?" he wondered. "That would be something!"
