I can't get over this... Regardless of what Pluto actually looks like, it's amazing to me that we are even able to see Pluto in this amount of detail, given that it has just been a tiny speck in the vast cosmos to us up to now.
However, given the detail in this picture (go to the link provided if you want to see a much larger version), I think speculation is rampant about what we are exactly seeing and what it means. To me, the white mostly unmarked area is obviously a sea of frozen nitrogen. You can see where the two regions meet how it looks a whole lot like a frozen lake where it meets the shore on Earth. You can see the islands that protrude from the ice where the elevation of that "rocky" landscape is higher than the level of the frozen fluid. If that is the true meaning of this picture, then the next question obviously becomes "what the heck caused that massive amount of landscape to be liquified and then freeze into place so it could turn into the level surface we see now? I am still favoring the theory of a sideswipe by some larger passing body that ended up with a marked up Pluto and a very large orbiting moon, Charon. I hope that's what scientists, the ones who really are experts in these questions, come up with. But any answer that addresses these questions will be fascinating.
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