https://www.boredpanda.com/plutos-heart-explained/
Pluto Got Its Heart “Mark” After Collision With Planetary Body Roughly Twice The Size Of Switzerland.
Previous studies have suggested that Pluto could have a subsurface ocean. If so, then the icy crust over the subsurface ocean would be thinner in the Sputnik Planitia region, creating a dense bulge of liquid water and causing a migration of mass toward the equator. Yet, new research shows something else. :-(
This massive bright region on the dwarf planet’s surface is better known as Tombaugh Regio. It expands roughly 1,000 miles and was named after Clyde Tombaugh, an astronomer who discovered Pluto in the 1930s. The large heart-shaped structure has been captivating scientists for nearly a decade, yet only now they are getting closer to the main answer on how it was formed.
The famous heart is not composed of a single element: Sputnik Planitia covers an area equivalent to a quarter of Europe or the United States. And surprisingly enough, this region is roughly 2.5 miles lower in elevation than most of Pluto’s surface.
Led by Martin Jutzi, a senior researcher at the University of Bern in Switzerland, the scientists used a specific simulation method called smoothed particle hydrodynamics to test various angles of collision and sizes of impactors. This was supposed to help find out which dynamics would lead to the formation of Sputnik Planitia, the western teardrop-shaped part of Pluto’s heart.
According to the new study, Sputnik Planitia was formed due to a collision with a planetary body, roughly twice the size of Switzerland from east to west, that likely crashed into Pluto at a slanted angle, rather than head-on.
“Pluto’s core is so cold that the (rocky body that collided with the dwarf planet) remained very hard and did not melt despite the heat of the impact, and thanks to the angle of impact and the low velocity, the core of the impactor did not sink into Pluto’s core, but remained intact as a splat on it,” explained Dr. Harry Ballantyne, the lead study author.
Somewhere beneath Sputnik is the remnant core of another massive body, that Pluto never quite digested.
In an earlier paper, scientists have discovered that Pluto’s icy heart makes wind blow. Above 4 kilometers (2.5 miles), they are blowing towards the west, which is the opposite direction from the dwarf planet’s eastern spin. As nitrogen within Tombaugh Regio vaporizes in the north and becomes ice in the south, its movement triggers westward winds. There’s no other place in the solar system that has such an atmosphere, except perhaps Neptune’s moon Triton.
“This whole concept of Pluto’s beating heart is a wonderful way of thinking about it,