VERIFIED FACT
Pluto has mountains made of water ice.
Why this sounds fake
Pluto feels like a tiny distant dot, not a place with landscapes and mountain ranges.
Pluto used to sit in many minds as a tiny, distant, half-forgotten dot. NASA's New Horizons mission changed that picture. NASA describes mountains on Pluto made of water ice, with some rising thousands of meters high. At Pluto's temperatures, water ice can behave more like rock. The surprise is not just that Pluto has scenery. It is that a world so far from the Sun, once reduced to a classroom planet-status argument, turned out to have dramatic terrain. The dot had mountains.
The Surprise
Pluto stopped being a distant dot and became a photographed landscape with mountains.
1 discovery explored
