NASA’s New Horizons flyby of Pluto on July 14, made the science community face the reality that they so far have incomplete understanding of planetary evolution. Now the craft has sent new images of the dwarf planet showing an alien-looking landscape with regular ripples.

As per the mission experts, the alien-looking landscape on Pluto’s surface resembles the scale patterns on a snakeskin. The most interesting thing about the new images is that, like other high-resolution views being beamed back from the Kuiper belt, planetary scientists have a vague idea about what actually is going on the dwarf world.

William McKinnon, New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging (GGI) team deputy lead, said, “It’s unique perplexing landscape stretching over hundreds of miles. It looks like tree bark or dragon scales than geology. This’ll take time to figure out; maybe it’s some combination of internal tectonic forces and ice sublimation driven by Pluto’s faint sunlight”.

Scientists baffled after seeing the alien-looking landscape got some more stunning imagery has been downlinked, including the highest-resolution color view of Pluto. The new images showed the zoomed-in portion of the dwarf world’s heart-shaped region, on a plane informally called Sputnik Planum.

The region, that has already been identified as possessing vast flows of exotic ices, also has small rocky islands of material focused around the adjoining ‘cells’ of icy material.

A closer analysis of these cells revealed that icy surface is of a corrugated texture another feature that is being explained by educated guesswork.