In the end, Pluto may be just a blog of agglomerating comets, according to a new theory by researchers after taking a harder look at the dwarf planet's famous "heart" feature found during the New Horizon mission, Space.com wrote.
New Horizon snapped the shot of the region in the most detailed pictures of Pluto ever during the spaceship's flyby in July 2015, Space.com said. The heart-shaped region was unofficially named Tombaugh Regio.
The left "lobe" of Pluto's heart-shaped feature, a 600-mile-wide ice plain, was recently renamed from Sputnik Planitia, Space.com said.
Scientists from the Southwest Research Institute, said their new theory came in part from discoveries made by the European Space Agency's spaceship Rosetta and its examination of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2016.
"We've developed what we call 'the giant comet' cosmochemical model of Pluto formation," Christopher Glein of the Southwest Research Institute's Space Science and Engineering Division said in a statement.
"We found an intriguing consistency between the estimated amount of nitrogen inside the glacier and the amount that would be expected if Pluto was formed by the agglomeration of roughly a billion comets or other Kuiper Belt objects similar in chemical composition to 67P, the comet explored by Rosetta," Glein added.
The institute reported that scientists are also looking at a "solar model" for Pluto's formation, theorizing it may have been created from very cold ices that would have had a chemical composition that more closely matches that of the Sun.
Institute researchers said that the low abundance of carbon monoxide on Pluto points to burial in surface ices or to destruction from liquid water.
"This research builds upon the fantastic successes of the New Horizons and Rosetta missions to expand our understanding of the origin and evolution of Pluto," Glein said in the institute's statement.
"Using chemistry as a detective's tool, we are able to trace certain features we see on Pluto today to formation processes from long ago. This leads to a new appreciation of the richness of Pluto's 'life story,' which we are only starting to grasp," he added.
New Horizon is now exploring objects in the Kuiper Belt, setting a record in December by sending pictures back to Earth from 3.79 billion miles away, according to NASA.
Rosetta ended its mission with the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko with a slow-motion crash into it in 2016. Rosetta deployed the lander Philae on the comet's surface in November 2014 and continued to monitor the comet while the object made its closest approach to the Sun.
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