According to NASA representatives, Pluto has a subsurface ocean, which, firstly, may indicate that other dwarf planets are capable of hiding liquid oceans, and secondly, it makes one think about the possibility of life in this oceanic environment.
According to William McKinnon, professor of planetary sciences at the University of Washington in St. Louis and co-author of two of four new studies on Pluto, Pluto's heart-shaped region hides an ocean of ammonia beneath it. This suggests that the existence of any life forms in this environment is hardly possible.
It is the presence of this pungent, colorless liquid that he believes helps explain not only Pluto's orientation in space, but also the persistence of the ocean's massive ice cap, which other researchers call 'wet', but McKinnon prefers to define it as 'thick'.
Using computer models, along with topographic and compositional data from the New Horizons spacecraft in July 2015 after the Pluto flyby, McKinnon performed a comprehensive analysis of the ocean below the surface of the Sputnik Planitia's region. This allowed him to write an incredibly interesting article about Pluto's gravity and orientation and the primary role of the subglacial ocean in this. The analysis showed that the subsurface ocean is about 1000 km wide and more than 80 km deep. The research was published in the journal Nature.
Sources: Phys
