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The most recognizable feature on Pluto is its"heart," a relatively bright valentine-shaped area known as Tombaugh Regio.
The study focuses on the western half of the heart, a roughly 1,000-mile-wide, teardrop-shaped region called Sputnik Planitia. That region contains an assortment of ices and is roughly 2.5 miles lower in elevation than the rest of Pluto. It's clearly the result of a massive impact. Ballantyne and his colleagues ran a wide assortment of computer simulations for the ancient impact. Those simulations reflected a range of sizes and compositions for the impacting body, at different velocities and angles of approach.
"Pluto's core is so cold that the rocks remained very hard and did not melt despite the heat of the impact, and thanks to the angle of impact and the low velocity, the core of the impactor did not sink into Pluto's core, but remained intact as a splat on it," Ballantyne explained.
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