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In July 2015, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft gave humanity its only chance. Pluto close-up. Spacecraft found dwarf planetfar from a featureless and cold sphere flamboyant world with epic impact craters, methane ice and nitrogen snow.

Two of its mountains, Wright Mons and Piccard Mons, were suspected to be volcanoes. But instead of spewing molten rock, they would be built from ice and capable of erupting in a process known as cryovolcanism.

After years of closely examining data from New Horizons, scientists think they’ve discovered evidence of recently erupted ice lava; this is a sign that Pluto is home to active cryovolcanoes in the recent geological past.

“We tried to find another way to explain it but we really couldn’t,” he said. Kelsi SingerD., a senior research scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., and author of the study published Tuesday in the journal Cell. Nature Communication.

If the team is correct, the results matter. Any erupting volcano requires a molten fuel source. If these ice lava deposits are young, then the underworld just below this point in Pluto’s icy crust was hot and liquid very recently, at least to some extent. And such a finding, however improbable for a small, icy sphere this far from the sun, lends credence to the hypothesis that present-day Pluto is an oceanic world.

In the last four decades, possible cryovolcanic features have been detected throughout the solar system, from the dwarf planet Ceres in the asteroid belt to Triton, the winter moons of Neptune.

An icy lava eruption has never been witnessed, but to see one on a world like Pluto is nothing short of surreal: Icy lava may come out of a dome’s vent or crevice, slowly coming out as a muddy mass – something comparable to Silly Putty, but made. It consists of one or more frozen chemical compounds and largely retains its chunky shape in a low gravity, extremely cold environment.

The discovery of Wright Mons and Piccard Mons on Pluto, two icy mountains with central pits resembling eruptive openings, suggested that it was also a member of the cryovolcanic club. However, it has been difficult to determine whether these ice volcanoes are really what they appear to be and whether they are still active.

After forensic analysis of New Horizons’ flight footage, Dr. Singer and colleagues suspect that Wright Mons and Piccard Mons are not two large cryovolcanoes. Instead, they are probably colonies of smaller volcanic domes made when very gloopy lava slowly erupts and forms squat heaps. It seems that many such domes grew in the same area and collided to form two mountainous masses.

But is this cryovolcanic colony still alive?

The team noticed that much of the area was covered with irregular, undulating patches made mostly of water ice. This terrain is unlike any distorted sediment formed by erosion elsewhere on Pluto. That leaves one possible explanation: Water-ice was made by lava flows. And since its sediments have no craters, the currents erupted close to the geological present.

Icy eruptions may be alien to this planet, but some geological underpinnings are probably familiar: Just as Earth’s active volcanoes sit above reservoirs of partially molten rock, Pluto’s volcanic domes may sit partially over reservoirs of liquid water ice. But in the case of the dwarf planet, these reservoirs could feed a large ocean.

Earlier studies suggested that Pluto had a subterranean ocean, although its existence was difficult to explain.

A world this small would have long ago lost the heat from its formation and does not contain enough radioactive, heat-radiating elements in its rocky core, so any liquid under its icy outer crust must be frozen. Various heat trapping hypotheses are also impossible right now prove.

It is not a dream to imagine frozen worlds containing oceans. EuropeJupiter’s moon and EnceladusBoth orbiting Saturn have undeniably inner oceans. But gravitational interactions with its planets and nearby moons that are thought to heat them are not the case for Pluto.

Yet Pluto’s young cryovolcanic terrain supports the case for its own subterranean seas, while adding evidence to two theories: that ocean worlds are commonplace in the cosmos, and that scientists have not always been able to explain how their existence is possible.

After all, data from New Horizons and other spacecraft consistently teach researchers the same lesson. “We needed a better imagination,” he said. Jani RadebaughA planetary scientist at Brigham Young University, Dr.