Complex Carbon Compounds Discovered on Pluto

Not bad, for a dwarf planet.

NASA's Hubble Telescope, not to be outdone by its upstart cousin, the Kepler Telescope, has discovered the first signs of what could be hydrocarbons, the basic building blocks of life, on faraway Pluto. The telescope's Cosmic Origins Spectroscope found that something on the planet's surface was absorbing ultraviolet light, leading a team at the Southwest Research Instituteto speculate that that could mean carbon-based compounds could exist on the planet's surface. The team hypothesizes that the complex compounds could have been created by sunlight reacting with other compounds, such as methane, on the planet's icy surface. While this doesn't mean that there's life on Pluto, the team believes that the presence of hydrocarbons could be why Pluto has a ruddy colour to it. NASA hopes that their New Horizons probe can help corroborate whether carbon-based compounds really are there when it swings by the dwarf planet in 2015.