A series of canyons snakes across Pluto's frigid north polar region, a gorgeous, newly released photo of the dwarf planet reveals.

The enhanced-color image, which was captured by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft during its historic Pluto flyby last July, shows a region informally named Lowell Regio, after Percival Lowell, the founder of Arizona's Lowell Observatory and the person who began the search that led to Pluto's discovery in 1930 (by American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh).

Several canyons run parallel across Lowell Regio, the photo reveals. The widest one measures about 45 miles (75 kilometers) across;. smaller, parallel canyons to the east and west of it are each about 6 miles (10 km) wide.

"The degraded walls of these canyons appear to be much older than the more sharply defined canyon systems elsewhere on Pluto, perhaps because the polar canyons are older and made of weaker material," NASA officials wrote in a description of the image, which was released Thursday (Feb. 25). "These canyons also appear to represent evidence for an ancient period of tectonics."

The photo also depicts a number of reddish pits, the largest of which are about 45 miles (70 km) across and 2.5 miles (4 km) deep. These mysterious features may indicate where subsurface ice melted and the ground fell in, NASA officials said.

The composition of Lowell Regio is intriguing and unusual. Some of the area's higher elevations show up in a yellow color not seen elsewhere on Pluto. The bluish-gray terrain in the image represents lower elevations and latitudes.

New Horizons' measurements revealed that Lowell Regio contains lots of methane ice and little nitrogen ice, mission team members said.

"One possibility is that the yellow terrains may correspond to older methane deposits that have been more processed by solar radiation than the bluer terrain," Will Grundy, New Horizons composition team lead from Lowell Observatory, said in a statement published with the image description.

New Horizons took the image on July 14 from a distance of 21,000 miles (33,900 km) from Pluto's surface, about 45 minutes before the probe's closest approach to the dwarf planet.

The spacecraft is now speeding toward a small object called 2014 MU69, which lies 1 billion miles (1.6 billion km) beyond Pluto. New Horizons will study 2014 MU69 up close on Jan. 1, 2019, if NASA approves and funds a proposed extended mission.

Follow Elizabeth Howell @howellspace, or Space.com @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook and Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

"The Martian" was left stranded without any Oscars on Sunday night (Feb. 28) at the 88th Academy Awards.

Ridley Scott's science fiction film about a NASA astronaut (Matt Damon) being left for dead on Mars received seven nominations — including Best Picture and Best Actor — but ended the evening with no wins.

"It's pretty cool just to be nominated," wrote Andy Weir, author of the book on which the "The Martian" is based, in a post on Facebook. "Slowly but surely, science fiction is worming its way into popular culture and mainstream entertainment. I'm proud to be a small part of that." [Photos from 'The Martian': Matt Damon on 'Mars']

Still, it was other science fiction and dramatic films that ultimately brought home the Oscars.

Drew Goddard, who wrote the screenplay for "The Martian" based Weir's book, lost out to Charles Randolph and Adam McKay for "The Big Short." Visual effects artists Richard Stammers, Anders Langlands, Chris Lawrence and Steven Warner, who transformed Jordan into the Red Planet, were passed over in favor for team behind "Ex Machina."

Paul Massey, Mark Taylor and Mac Ruth, whose sound mixing on "The Martian" was recognized with a nomination, and Oliver Tarney, who was similarly honored for sound editing, lost to the sound engineers on "Mad Max: Fury Road." The same was true for "Martian" production designers Arthur Max and Celia Bobak.

Damon, who played Ares III crewmember Mark Watney, lost to a different type of frontiersman, Leonardo DiCaprioin "The Revenant," for Best Actor in a Leading Role.

And it was "Spotlight," about the real journalists who uncovered systemic child sex abuse in the Catholic church, that won the Academy Award for Best Picture, over the "The Martian."

The only other space-related film to be nominated this year, the animated short "We Can't Live Without Cosmos," was also left without an Oscar — the Academy Award going to "Bear Story." Directed by Konstantin Bronzit, "Cosmos" follows two cosmonauts and friends who try to do their best in their everyday training life to make their common dream a reality.

The evening, however, was not completely devoid of happy space-themed moments.

Josh Singer, who with Tom McCarthy was the writing team behind the film "Spotlight," won for best original screenplay. Singer is now working on the script for Universal Studios' Neil Armstrong biopic, based on historian James Hansen's biography "First Man," to be directed by Damien Chazelle ("Whiplash").

C-3PO, R2-D2 and BB-8 from "Star Wars" took to the stage to pay tribute to composer John Williams, who was nominated for his 50th Academy Award.

And Buzz Lightyear, the fictional space ranger (and sometimes International Space Station resident), was literally drawn onto the stage with his "Toy Story" co-star, Woody, to present the Oscar for best animated film.

Comedian Chris Rock used his platform as the ceremony's host to raise attention to the lack of diversity among this year's nominees. As part of this, Rock took Damon's place in a re-staged clip from "The Martian," where NASA Administrator Theodore Sanders (Jeff Daniels) and NASA public affairs officer Annie Montrose (Kristen Wiig) debated if it was worth spending $2500 "white dollars" to save a "black astronaut."

"The Martian" earlier won two Golden Globes for Best Motion Picture — Musical or Comedy, and Best Actor (Damon) in the same category.

Robert Z. Pearlman is a Space.com contributing writer and the editor of collectSPACE.com, a Space.compartner site and the leading space history-focused news publication. Follow collectSPACE.comon Facebookand on Twitter at @collectSPACE. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

Geologic activity on a planet is believed to be very important for life, but it can be hard to spot its signs from far away — especially on smaller, rocky planets akin to Earth.

What if there was a large volcanic eruption on such an Earth-like planet — could we spot that? A group of graduate students at the University of Washington's astrobiology program considered this question after it arose during a class discussion about the search for life outside our solar system.

"All life needs energy," said doctoral student Joshua Krissansen-Totton. "At first we thought about plate tectonics. It's not necessary for life, but looking into it, we thought it might be a good indicator of places that are habitable. But it's very hard to spot that, so we looked more closely at volcanism." [Related: The Strangest Alien Planets]

The resulting article, "Transient Sulfate Aerosols as a Signature of Exoplanet Volcanism," was published in the journal Astrobiology in June. The work was funded by the NASA Astrobiology Institute's Virtual Planetary Laboratory.

Subtracting light

A common way of spotting Earth-sized planets is through the transit method. A telescope, such as NASA's Kepler space telescope, monitors a star for a long time looking for a planet to pass in front of it. Spotting small planets is easiest when they orbit dwarf stars because of the smaller ratio between the star's radius and the planet's radius. A larger star has enough light to easily obscure the tiny transit. However, spotting these small planets in this way says nothing necessarily about their atmospheres. 

The scenario is arguably easier with very large planets. A spectrometer picks up the spectrum of light coming from the direction of a star and astronomers can look for a change in light signature when a planet passes in front to deduce the chemical composition of the planet's atmosphere. The first such measurements were done in 2002using gas giant HD 209458 (Charbonneau et al., 2002).

Our current technology doesn't allow us to do this with an Earth-sized planet at exoplanet distances, but Krissansen-Totton and his collaborators came up with another solution. When a volcano erupts, it tends to puff out the atmosphere as sulfur leaves the volcano and creates sulfate aerosols in the upper atmosphere through interactions with other molecules. Perhaps it's possible to see an atmosphere expanding and then contracting again on a small planet, even from a fairly large distance.

Pinatubo and Sarychev

In this paper, the researchers considered two scenarios. The first was looking at a volcanic eruption about the size of the 1991 Pinatubo eruption. This particular eruption was the second-largest in the 20th Century, following a 1912 eruption in Alaska. They also considered a more common volcanic scenario, such as the relatively small 2009 Sarychev eruption in Russia that caused some disruptions to flights due to an ash cloud.

The researchers tried simulating the capabilities of two forthcoming observatories: NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (to launch in 2018) and the ground-based European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) in Chile, scheduled to light up in 2024.

When the researchers created a model using these scenarios, they discovered that a Sarychev eruption would be very hard to spot on an Earth-sized planet orbiting a Sun-like star about 10 parsecs (32 light-years) away. The larger Pinatubo eruption, however, did create a rapid increase and gradual decrease in the planet's radius that could more easily be spotted with the telescopes.

Recent planetary find

This is all the more exciting, Krissansen-Totton added, with the recent discovery of GJ 1132b. This planet is slightly larger than Earth and hovers so close as to orbit its parent star in a mere 38 hours, making it a real scorcher in terms of temperature. The planet also happens to be relatively near to Earth – just 12 parsecs (39 light-years) away. Krissansen-Totton said there would be limitations in understanding such a planet's atmospheric composition.

"There's a good chance it'll have a thick Venus-like atmosphere," he said. "On Venus, nothing is visible below 90 kilometers because of its cloud layers; explosive eruptions on a Venus-like exoplanet would be obscured by cloud."

Volcanoes are a fairly common feature in the Solar System. In icy form, we have seen eruptions on Saturn's moon Enceladus. There also is evidence of volcanic eruptions (whether in the past or present) in locations such as Venus and even Pluto, the latter of which was seen close-up for the first time this year by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft.

"Many people think hydrothermal settings are crucial in the origin of life," Krissansen-Totton said. "So we're more interested in seeing planets with volcanic activity."

This story was provided by Astrobiology Magazine, a web-based publication sponsored by the NASA astrobiology program. Follow Space.com @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+.