"Places on Pluto are Being Named for Your Darkest Imaginings". "New Horizons Reveals Ice Mountains on Pluto". "Latest New Horizons Photo Shows Close-Up of Pluto's Young Mountains". "This is the first high resolution image of Pluto's surface". "New map of Pluto reveals a 'whale' and a 'donut' ". The Walt Disney Company acknowledged this perceived likeness in a short animation. Some people find that it also resembles the Disney character Pluto, an animated non-anthropomorphic dog which shares the name of the dwarf planet, in profile facing eastward. NASA initially referred to the region as a "heart" in reference to its overall shape. On 7 September 2017, the name was officially approved by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), together with names for 13 other surface features on Pluto.
On 15 July 2015, the region was provisionally named "Tombaugh Regio" by the New Horizons team in honor of astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto, regio being Latin for "region". In 2020, it was found that Tombaugh Regio controlled the wind circulation of Pluto, and could sculpt the landscape on its surface. Over these six decades the spot had been observed to be dimming. The feature had been identified as a bright spot for six decades prior to the New Horizons flyby, although it was impossible to image it with enough resolution to determine its shape. The surface of Sputnik Planitia is divided into polygonal convection cells and is less than 10 million years old, indicating that Pluto is geologically active. Subsequent data indicated that the center of Sputnik Planitia is rich in nitrogen, carbon monoxide, and methane ices, and that features near the edges of the region show evidence of ice flow such as glaciers, and light material overlying the darker material at the eastern edge of Cthulhu Macula. Photos, released on 15 July 2015, revealed 3,400 m (11,000 ft) mountains made of water ice in the feature they also showed no craters in this same region. Bright spots within the region were initially speculated to be mountain peaks. Early speculation was that the western lobe may be a large impact crater filled with nitrogen snow. The western lobe, Sputnik Planitia, is smoother than the eastern, and they are of slightly different colors. The two lobes of the feature are geologically distinct. Tombaugh Regio is a large, light-colored region about 1,590 km (990 mi) across. Named after Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto, it was nicknamed Pluto's "heart" after its shape. Some of this nitrogen ice then returns to Sputnik Planitia via glacial flow.
The eastern lobe consists of high-albedo uplands thought to be coated by nitrogen transported through the atmosphere from Sputnik Planitia, and then deposited as ice. Its western lobe, a 1,000 km (620 mi)-wide plain of nitrogen and other ices lying within a basin, is named Sputnik Planitia. It is just north of the equator, to the northeast of Cthulhu Macula and to the northwest of Krun Macula, which are both dark features. Tombaugh Regio ( / ˈ t ɒ m b aʊ ˈ r ɛ dʒ i oʊ/) is the largest bright surface feature of the dwarf planet Pluto. A detailed view of Tombaugh Regio a constructed mosaic of monochrome images by New Horizons.
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