Pluto's heart-shaped plain shows no craters, revealing active surface renewal

At the edge of the solar system, a world long presumed frozen in geological silence is revealing itself to be something far more restless. Pluto's heart-shaped nitrogen ice plain bears no impact craters — not because it has been spared, but because its surface is continuously renewed from within, erasing the marks of cosmic history as fast as they are made. This discovery, born from data gathered during the 2015 New Horizons flyby, asks us to reconsider which worlds we deem alive, and what we mean by alive at all.