The result? A patchy, pixelated sphere just 12 pixels wide. Even from these images, Pluto seemed pretty intriguing. The light and dark pixels seemed to suggest geological or atmospheric activity.

Once, when asked how spending all night for months searching for Pluto ... had a real problem when they started finding several of these things flying around the place." In this 2009 photo ...

Pluto, discovered in 1930 ... The machine involved taking pairs of photos of the evening sky several nights apart and then using a special viewer to rapidly switch between the two.

(Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated how far Pluto is from the sun ... The machine involved taking pairs of photos of the evening sky several nights apart and then using ...

Nguyen and his team used mathematical models and images from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft to investigate Pluto’s subsurface ocean. Also read: Massive iceberg in Antarctica breaks off in ...

Although previous images showed that something was ... from a hidden ocean or radioactive elements beneath Pluto's surface. This would be a real turn-up for the books as, until now, astronomers ...