3 Billion Miles for THIS Picture: What NASA Found on the Edge of the Solar System

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:06]9 years of travel, 3 billion miles through the darkness of space, and this is what was waiting at the end of the journey, the icy mountains of Pluto rising up to 11,000 ft above the surface, towering over frozen plains that stretch all the way to the horizon.

[00:00:23]This image was captured by NASA's New Horizon spacecraft just 15 minutes after its closest approach to Pluto on July 14th, 2015, taken from 11,000 miles away, with the sun backlighting more than a dozen layers of haze in Pluto's thin atmosphere.

[00:00:41]Those mountains are made of solid water ice, but at Pluto's surface temperature of -380° Fahrenheit, water ice behaves exactly like rock, hard, rigid, and ancient.

[00:00:55]Scientists believe these peaks formed no more than 100 million years ago, which sounds old, but in the four, five billion year history of our solar system, these mountains are practically newborns.

[00:01:09]And there are almost no craters on them, which means something may still be reshaping Pluto's surface to this day.

[00:01:15]One spacecraft, one flyby, one image that changed everything we thought we knew about the edge of our solar system.