Wondrous dunes on Pluto are made of grains of frozen methane


  • World
  • Friday, 01 Jun 2018

The planet Pluto is pictured in a handout image made up of four images from New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) taken in July 2015 combined with color data from the Ralph instrument to create this enhanced color global view. NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI/Handout via REUTERS

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scientists have detected another exotic feature on one of the solar system's most wondrous worlds, a large field of dunes on the surface of the distant, frigid dwarf planet Pluto apparently composed of wind-swept, sand-sized grains of frozen methane.

The dunes, spotted on images taken by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft during its 2015 flyby, sit at the boundary between a heart-shaped nitrogen glacier about the size of France called Sputnik Planitia and the Al Idrisi Montes mountain range made of frozen water, scientists said on Thursday.

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