Pluto Has White-Capped Mountains, But Not Because There's Snow

"Pluto is the only place other than Earth in our solar system that's known to have white-peaked mountains, but these white caps aren't made of snow."

"Instead, they're made of methane frost. And, according to a new report in the journal Nature Communications, these alien mountains get their peaks whitened in a way that's totally unlike what occurs on Earth's summits."

"'Initially, it seemed logical that this high-altitude frost could form like on the Earth,' says Tanguy Bertrand, an astronomer at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, who was intrigued by how much Pluto's mountains resembled familiar landscapes here at home."

"The mountains that he and his colleagues examined were observed by NASA's New Horizons mission, and they lie west of a big heart-shaped glacier at Pluto's equator. They're about two and a half miles tall."

"'They are comparable to the Alps for Earth, but Pluto is a much smaller object,' says Bertrand. 'So for Pluto, the mountains are really tall.'"