A dimly lit surface
In this rendering, created in 2015 in anticipation of New Horizons’ arrival at the dwarf planet, Charon looms over Pluto and the Sun is a distant light. The artist interpreted Pluto’s surface features based on previous, fuzzy observations by the Hubble Space Telescope. Based on Pluto’s distance from the Sun, scientists knew that gases on its surface—namely nitrogen, carbon monoxide, and methane—would freeze, according to a Hubble release. The illustration also includes several ridges; we now know that Pluto has some mountains that are nearly 10,000 feet tall and made of frozen water ice. The Sun may be a little large in this illustration—on Pluto’s surface, our star is 1,000 times fainter than it is on Earth.
Here’s Pluto’s icy terrain, as seen from New Horizons during its July 2015 flyby:
