ice mountains on Pluto?

Question

ice volcanoes or mountains?
pluto once belonged to the kupiter belt which was mostly icy bodies and to this day those icy bodies still hit pulto and when the icy bodies hit plutos atmosphere they become mixed with nitrgoen and then the ice eventually fomr ice structues casuing the nitrogen to get lodgeed in the ice... and then when pluto goes throught its "season" where it switched place with another planet the temp also get hotter casuing the ice to erode leaving the nitrogen to come out of the ice stucture just like volcanoe ( colder thought)

ps my class talked about this one day

Answer 1

China Jon...you're the one that is wrong on almost all counts.

Ashley, it is true that we don't precisely know all of these things about Pluto. However, your teacher did correctly convey the most popular theories of what we will find at Pluto...which is a body very much like Neptune's moon Triton (which in turn is believed to be a captured Kuiper Belt Object). Voyager 2 did find geysers on Triton (volcanoes, if you will) that are probably spewing nitrogen. I think you're confused on the "switching place with another planet" (that simply does not happen) but despite its distance from the sun, Pluto does have seasons...both because of a high inclined rotational axis but also because its closest point to the sun is about twice as close as its farthest point. Indeed, at its closest approach to the sun back in the late 1980s, a tenuous atmosphere was detected. It is believed that this atmosphere freezes back onto the surface when Pluto travels farther from the sun.

So, indeed, we may find ice mountains/volcanoes on Pluto, though they are likely to be a mixture of ices...water, methane, nitrogen, etc. The New Horizons probe will fly by the Pluto system in 2014. That will surely answer some of our questions about Pluto but probably raise many more.

Answer 2

You make too many assumptions!
1. It is not clear where Pluto came from.
2. You don't know if anything is still hitting Pluto.
3. Pluto has no atmosphere. It is too small to hold on to one.
4. There is no nitrogen around Pluto, so it can't have nitrogen volcanoes.
5. Pluto is too far from the Sun to have seasons. No matter where Pluto is in its orbit, it is cold.

;-D It is fun to speculate about what might be true, but it is a waste of time to speculate without checking some information first.

Answer 3

Most likely Methane.