The heart-shaped area besides Pluto’s equator has been the main focus of the US space agency’s New Horizons mission, but in this week’s featured image, the North Polar Region has been in focus.

The area visible in the image belongs to a region informally called Lowell Regio. It is a tribute to Percival Lowell, the millionaire astronomer who started the exploration that ultimately resulted in discovery of Pluto.

On the left side of the featured image, there’s a canyon measuring nearly 45 miles wide. Other canyons present to the east and west are roughly 6 miles wide. According to the New Horizons science team, the formations are indicating towards a tectonic activity in ancient times.

Towards the lower right corner of the released featured picture, there are irregularly shaped pits spanning around 45 miles. The study team added that the pits are nearly 2.5 miles deep, and could indicate sites where subsurface ice has been gone away from below. That would have the reason behind the collapse of the surface layer into the void.

In the enhanced-color image, the higher elevations have more of a yellowish cast, while the lower elevations are quite bluish-gray in color. Infrared readings indicated that the area has plenty of methane ice, but not lot of nitrogen ice.

In NASA’s image advisory, the Lowell Observatory’s Will Grundy, who heads the New Horizons mission’s composition team, said, “One possibility is that the yellow terrains may correspond to other methane deposits that have been more processed by solar radiation than the bluer terrain”.

The crux is the north pole, like Pluto’s heart, has suggested that dwarf planet’s geology is quite more active as compared to what scientists would have thought of prior to last July’s flyby.