Téléchargez les best-sellers New Horizons: Rediscovering Pluto

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Vast frozen plains exist next door to Pluto's big, rugged mountains sculpted of ice, scientists said, three days after humanity's first-ever flyby of the dwarf planet on July 14, 2015. The New Horizons spacecraft team revealed close-up photos of those plains, which they're already unofficially calling Sputnik Planum after the world's first man-made satellite. "Have a look at the icy frozen plains of Pluto," principal scientist Alan Stern said during a briefing at NASA headquarters. "Who would have expected this kind of complexity?" Stern described the pictures coming down from 3 billion miles away as "beautiful eye candy." "I'm still having to remind myself to take deep breaths," added Jeff Moore, head of the New Horizons geology team at NASA's Ames Research Center in California. "I mean, the landscape is just astoundingly amazing. Spanning hundreds of miles, the plains are located in the prominent, bright, heart-shaped area of Pluto. Like the mountains unveiled by New Horizons, the plains look to be a relatively young 100 million years old - at the most. Scientists speculate internal heating - perhaps from icy volcanoes or geysers- might still be shaping these crater-free regions.