New Pluto facts

Pluto has mountains made of ice that are as high as those in the Rockies, images from the New Horizons probe reveal.

They also show signs of geological activity on Pluto and its moon Charon.
On Wednesday, scientists presented the first pictures acquired by the New Horizons probe during its historic flyby of the dwarf planet.
The team has also named the prominent heart-shaped region on Pluto after the world's discoverer Clyde Tombaugh.
The spacecraft sped past the dwarf planet on Tuesday, getting as close as 12,500km and grabbing a huge volume of data.
 Mission scientist John Spencer told journalists that the first close-up image of Pluto's surface showed a terrain that had been resurfaced by some geological process - such as volcanism - within the last 100 million years.
 Not found is a single impact crater on this image. This means it must be a very young surface!!!
 This active geology needs some source of heat. Previously, such activity has only been seen on icy moons, where it can be explained by "tidal heating" caused by gravitational interactions with a large host planet.
 You do not need tidal heating to power geological activity on icy worlds. That's a really important discovery we just made this morning!! I still think most of the power come from under Pluto surface.
We now have an isolated, small planet that's showing activity after 4.5 billion years!
 This same image shows mountains at the edge of the heart-like region that are up to 11,000ft (3,300m) high and which team members compared to North America's Rocky Mountains.
T he relatively thin coating of methane, carbon monoxide and nitrogen ice on Pluto's surface was not strong enough to form mountains, so they were probably composed of Pluto's water-ice bedrock.
 Water-ice at Pluto temperatures is strong enough to hold up big mountains,remember at the temp at Pluto the water Ice is very hard!!!!!!
The thin frosting of nitrogen and other volatiles on top of water-ice bedrock was intriguing, because Pluto's tenuous, mainly nitrogen atmosphere was constantly being lost to space.

 Canyons on Charon A new image of Charon, Pluto’s largest moon. The moon has a dark patch, informally called Mordor, at its north pole. The image was taken from a distance of 289,000 miles.