[Pluto has blue skies and patches of frozen water, according to the latest data out Thursday from NASA’s unmanned New Horizons probe, which made a historic flyby of the dwarf planet in July.
Never before has Pluto — a resident of the distant Kuiper Belt, a frigid region of the solar system beyond Neptune that is home to many comets and asteroids — been observed in such detail.
“Who would have expected a blue sky in the Kuiper Belt? It’s gorgeous,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.]
