29 March 2022
A unique lumpy landscape on Pluto was probably built up via ice seeping up from its surprisingly warm interior that has created volcanoes as large as those on Earth – and that cryovolcanism could continue to this day
5 November 2021
After NASA’s New Horizons mission flew past Pluto in 2015, it turned around and took pictures of the dwarf planet’s back, revealing its moonlit dark side
21 June 2021
Huge swathes of Pluto’s surface are covered in a mysterious red material, and planetary scientists’ best guess for what it could be doesn’t seem to match up to data from the New Horizons probe
11 May 2021
From cataclysmic supervolcanos on Earth to ice plumes on Enceladus, the solar system is a wildly volcanic place. This is your guide.
30 June 2020
Pluto has one very large moon, Charon, and four tiny ones, leaving astronomers confused as to how they formed. The answer may be that the quartet used to be part of Charon, not Pluto
30 March 2020
Pluto’s ancient oceans may have come about just after the icy world was born, melting from ice in a process that suggests the dwarf planet took just 30,000 years to form
5 February 2020
Every day on Pluto, nitrogen puffs out the icy world’s heart-shaped plain into the atmosphere, and every night it refreezes, creating winds unlike any we’ve seen before
23 October 2019
Designating rocks just a few kilometres across as moons is misleading and ridiculous. We need to do a Pluto and cut moons down to size, argues Leah Crane
29 May 2019
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has found signatures of ammonia on Pluto, which probably spurted from under the surface in fountains relatively recently
20 May 2019
Pluto may harbour an ocean that’s kept liquid by an extra layer of gas molecules trapped in the ice at the base of its frigid shell
