Scientists have discovered an icy volcano on the dwarf planet, Pluto

A cluster of dome-shaped ice volcanoes has been spotted on Pluto that looks nothing like anything known in our solar system also may still be active. This discovery, using data from NASA's New Horizons mission, shows that this remote frozen world is more dynamic than previously thought.

According to scientists, the cryovolcanoes, which can be ten or more, are located at elevations of 6-tenths of a mile (1 km) to four also a half miles (7 km). Unlike terrestrial volcanoes, which eject gas and molten rock, cryovolcanos on these dwarf planets emit large amounts of ice — likely frozen water and no other frozen material — with the consistency of toothpaste, according to the researchers.

Cryovolcanoes have also been identified on the asteroid belt dwarf planet Ceres, Saturn's moons Enceladus and Titan, Jupiter's European moons, and Neptune's moon Triton. However, according to the researchers, it's surface parameters, including atmospheric temperature and pressure and various icy elements, differ from Pluto's.

"Finding this feature suggests that Pluto is more active or geologically alive than we thought," said lead author and planetary scientist Kelsey Singer of the Southwestern Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

"This combination of features, which are geologically new, cover a large area, and are most likely composed of water ice, is surprising because it requires more internal heat than we would expect from Pluto at this point in its history," Singer added.

Pluto, smaller than Earth's Moon and about 1,400 miles (2,380 kilometers) in diameter, orbits the Sun at a distance of approximately 3.6 billion miles (5.8 billion kilometers), about 40 times larger than Earth. 

Images and data from the latest study, extracted by New Horizons in 2015, confirm previous assumptions about Pluto's cryovolcanism.

 According to Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwestern Research Institute, principal investigator, and co-author of New Horizons, the study found evidence of widespread cryovolcanism and that it was a long-lived event, not just one.