According to NASA, this observation reveals the alleged Wright Mons cryovolcan recorded by the New Horizons apparatus on July 14, 2015. The color was enhanced with a multispectral digital camera (MVIC), a picture taken from a distance of 21,000 mile (34,000 km) and with a resolution of about 2,100 feet (650 m) per pixel. The whole picture covers an area of 140 miles (230 km) wide.
The mysteriously developing and “youthful” surface of Pluto has intrigued even more after the publication of this stunning color image, which supposedly depicts a cryovolcan.
Since this is a dwarf planet located very far from the Sun, it was considered to be a frozen, stationary world with a large number of impact craters before the historic flight of New Horizons in July last year. However, the study of the NASA spacecraft shows us that y Pluto is predominantly a non-crater surface with some zones in which active processes dominate both in the atmosphere and on the surface. Pluto may be cold, but even the ices in the Kuiper Belt are moving slowly, creating their own convection currents, similar to the action of a lava lamp. It is assumed that due to the heating of the ice inside the crust, Pluto melting volatile substances (like water or methane) will subsequently erupt to the surface, almost like molten rock erupting from the core of our planet, forming volcanoes.
Now, with the discovery of this mountain with a height of 4 kilometers on the surface of Pluto, planetologists are trying to understand how the formation was formed 230 km across, and whether this could be another sign of the amazing dynamics of a small world and an amazing example of cryovolcanism.
With its unofficial name - “Plateau Wright”, this huge formation can become the largest volcano outside the solar system if it is recognized as such. (In the solar system, the largest volcano is Olympus Volcano, seen in the atmosphere of the Red Planet, reaches a height of 25 kilometers).
Of particular interest in the color image of “Plateau Wright” is the distribution of the red substance - why is it not distributed over the entire surface of Pluto? Also, most likely, there are several impact craters around Wright Mons. There is actually only one crater on the mountain itself. This tells us that this is indeed an icy volcano, which was active in recent geological history - if it were an inactive, immovable artifact, it would then have been littered with impact craters. Instead, recently emerging active processes, possibly related to Pluto’s ice, have destroyed most of the impact craters. Pluto tells us the story through its amazing geological processes - processes that only some experts relied on the existence of in the extreme limits of the solar system before the New Horizons collided with them on the dwarf planet.
