Pluto Has an Underground Ocean of Water, Scientists Says

The sea is believed to be buried 93- to 124 miles beneath Pluto's giant impact basin, known as Sputnik Planitia, which lies within the heart-shaped Tombaugh Regio.

The ocean is estimated to be 62 miles deep, said planetary scientist Francis Nimmo, with the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Evidence for the ocean, comes from images and analysis of data collected by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, which flew in July 2015.

"A thick, heavy ocean, the new data suggest, may have served as a 'gravitational anomaly,' or weight, which would factor heavily in Pluto and Charon's gravitational tug-of-war," according to MIT News.

"Over millions of years, the planet would have spun around, aligning its subsurface ocean and the heart-shaped region above it, almost exactly opposite along the line connecting Pluto and Charon."

"We think Pluto may have had its atmosphere almost as thick as the Mars atmosphere which is pretty amazing," said Richard Binzel, professor of planetary sciences at MIT, who was involved in the New Horizons mission to Pluto.

"We see evidence for flat, frozen ponds on Pluto."

The analysis suggests that billions of years ago Pluto was hit by a comet or a Kuiper Belt object, forming a basin on the surface. The depression had then filled with nitrogen ice, which caused the dwarf planet to roll over, stressing and cracking the crust in the process. Eventually the faults caused Pluto's mountains and canyons to form.

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