Something very strange is going on around Pluto. The icy world that sits some 5.9 billion kilometres from the Sun appears to be emitting X-rays ” high energy radiation associated with gases with temperatures of a million degrees. That makes Pluto the furthest known X-ray source in our solar system. If confirmed, the finding could reshape our understanding of the dwarf planet’s atmosphere.
Before we’d seen Pluto up close, most astronomers imagined it to be a dead little nugget of ice and rock. But as the New Horizons spacecraft got closer, it started detecting signs of an atmosphere. This got a group of researchers, including Carey Lisse of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and Scott Wolk of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, wondering if Pluto might be visible in the X-ray part of the spectrum.
