Scientists are scratching their heads after discovering X-ray emissions originating from the dwarf planet, Pluto.
Located 3.6 billion miles away from the sun, the icy alien world seems to be an unlikely candidate for high energy radiation due to its vast distances from the sun.
Pluto is located near the Kuiper Belt region in the solar system that is filled with icy space rocks extending for millions of miles to the outer reaches of our neighborhood. Scientists say that these X-ray emissions could provide crucial clues about Pluto's atmosphere.
With the help of NASA's New Horizons probe, which completed a historic flyby of Pluto last year, new data emerged identifying the origins of this radiation as Pluto. Scientists from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics now want to explore the dwarf planet using X-ray wavelengths.
According to Scott Wolk of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, it is possible that high energy particles emitted by the sun crashed into cold gas sparking atomic reactions that created an X-ray glow of Pluto.
Researchers have identified the X-ray light photons emanating from the planet using the Chandra X-ray Observatory revealing how the dwarf planet is not necessarily dead and frozen but more lukewarm in reality.
Scientists also say that there is no magnetic field around Pluto suggesting that these X-rays are bouncing off the surface, as scientists believe that this radiation is not of solar origin. Solar particles have collided with the planet's tenuous atmosphere made of nitrogen, carbon, and oxygen, but further research is needed to determine if Pluto's lukewarm temperature may support microbial life.