What Pluto and California Have in Common
Scientists have discovered an unexpected landscape on the dwarf planet.
When Jani Radebaugh saw a picture of Pluto a few years ago, she saw something that reminded her of Earth.
She was examining taken by New Horizons, the spacecraft that swung by the dwarf planet in 2015 before coasting deeper into the solar system. In one spot, Pluto’s gray surface resembled the Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes, in California’s Death Valley, where the landscape undulates with silky ripples in the hot sand. Radebaugh, a planetary scientist at Brigham Young University,
