Caption: 
A team led by NASA’s New Horizons mission has published a paper in Nature Communications determining that cryovolcanic activity most likely created unique structures on Pluto not yet seen anywhere else in the solar system. The amount of material required to create the formations suggest its interior structure retained heat at some point in its history, enabling water-ice-rich materials to build up and resurface the region through cryovolcanic processes. The surface and atmospheric hazes of Pluto are shown here in greyscale, with an artistic interpretation of how past volcanic processes may have operated superimposed in blue.

Credit: 
Courtesy of NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute