These findings suggest that Pluto may harbor at least some features favorable to the evolution of life, researchers said.

Scientists analyzed data that NASA’s New Horizons probe gathered during its flyby of the dwarf planet in 2015. In this data, they found evidence of ammonia on Pluto’s surface in areas that previous research suggested had experienced tectonic activity.

“In recent years, ammonia has been a bit like the ‘holy grail’ of planetary science,” study lead author Cristina Dalle Ore, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, told Space.com. One reason for this is that ammonia is a key ingredient in chemical reactions underlying life as we know it, “and therefore, when found, it flags [the presence of] an environment that is conducive to life. This does not mean that life is present — and we have not yet found it — but it indicates a place where we should look.”

Ammonia “is a fragile molecule and gets destroyed by ultraviolet irradiation as well as cosmic rays,” Dalle Ore said. “Therefore, when found on a surface, it implies that it had been emplaced there relatively recently, some million years before [being found].”

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The term Milky Way is a translation of the Latin via lactea, from the Greek γαλαξίας κύκλος (galaxías kýklos, “milky circle”).From Earth, the Milky Way appears as a band because its disk-shaped structure is viewed from within. Galileo Galilei first resolved the band of light into individual stars with his telescope in 1610.

Until the early 1920s, most astronomers thought that the Milky Way contained all the stars in the Universe.Following the 1920 Great Debate between the astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, observations by Edwin Hubble showed that the Milky Way is just one of many galaxies.

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