Pluto's "heart," which was photographed by the New Horizons spacecraft in July 2015, captured the heart of the netizens. Scientists were also captivated by the geological discovery. New Horizons' Principal Investigator Alan Stern called it "one of the most amazing geological discoveries in 50-plus years of planetary exploration."
The heart - named after the Earth's first artificial satellite Sputnik Planum, is a 900 km wide basin. Research has shown that the region appears to be constantly renewed by current-day ice convection. The thin shell of nitrogen ice on Pluto's surface is suspected to cover a shell of water ice.
Water is one of the primary ingredients that make life possible. This is the reason why space exploration in search for life out there focuses on regions where temperatures make liquid water possible. If Pluto, indeed, contains liquid water, then there's a possibility that life may exist or have existed in Pluto at some point.
In 2011, planetary scientists Guillaume Robuchon and Francis Nimmo from University of California at Santa Cruz, studied the thermal evolution of the dwarf planet and suggested that water ocean could exist underneath this icy shell. However, according to Nimmo, Pluto most probably won't contain life because the organic nutrients were probably leached away years ago.
A recent simulation done by Brandon Johnson from Brown University, Timothy Bowling of the University of Chicago, and Alexander Trowbridge and Andrew Freed from Purdue University suggests that there is a deep ocean beneath the icy surface of the dwarf planet. The ocean may be 100 kilometers thick and with a salty composition like the Dead Sea.
It is interesting to note that a planet located very far from the sun may contain one main ingredient for life to exist. But according to scientists, the planet's ice flows and other factors that repave its surface is only possible with heat. Some suggest that the heat comes from the radioactive elements in Pluto's interior. Others believe that cryovolcanoes or volcanoes of ice are responsible for the geological formation on Pluto's surface.
