After teasing space fans by saying an "amazing" announcement would come Thursday, NASA revealed it has found blue skies and water ice on the planet.
The news comes on the heels of another startling revelation about Mars. NASA said last month it found evidence of current flowing water on the red planet.
NASA released the first color images of Pluto's atmospheric hazes sent to earth but its New Horizons spacecraft last week. The photos show blue hazes around the planet.
"Who would have expected a blue sky in the Kuiper Belt? It's gorgeous," Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator, said Thursday.
"The haze particles themselves are likely gray or red, but the way they scatter blue light has gotten the attention of the New Horizons science team," the NASA release said.
"That striking blue tint tells us about the size and composition of the haze particles," science team researcher Carly Howett said. "A blue sky often results from scattering of sunlight by very small particles. On Earth, those particles are very tiny nitrogen molecules. On Pluto they appear to be larger -- but still relatively small -- soot-like particles we call tholins."
More from NASA: "Scientists believe the tholin particles form high in the atmosphere, where ultraviolet sunlight breaks apart and ionizes nitrogen and methane molecules and allows them to react with one another to form more and more complex negatively and positively charged ions. When they recombine, they form very complex macromolecules, a process first found to occur in the upper atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan. The more complex molecules continue to combine and grow until they become small particles; volatile gases condense and coat their surfaces with ice frost before they have time to fall through the atmosphere to the surface, where they add to Pluto's red coloring.
"In a second significant finding, New Horizons has detected numerous small, exposed regions of water ice on Pluto. The discovery was made from data collected by the Ralph spectral composition mapper on New Horizons. "
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