Dwarf planet Pluto has always been a bit of an oddball in the solar system, but a recent discovery shows that the celestial body has been giving off some strange signals.

According to the October study published on the findings, during a July 2015 flyby with a New Horizons spacecraft. NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, which was aimed at Pluto and its moons, detected low-energy emissions coming off of it.

“We’ve just detected, for the first time, X-rays coming from an object in our Kuiper Belt, and learned that ,” astrophysicist and team leader Carey Lisse said in a release. “We can expect other large Kuiper Belt objects to be doing the same.”

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He added that the discovery was somewhat of a surprise, considering Pluto is rocky, cold, and has no magnetic field or natural mechanism for giving off X-rays. However, he acknowledges that gasses around planetary bodies can interact with thesolar wind to create the radioactivity.

“ at the same rate as [some] comets,” Lisse said in a statement obtained by Science News. “We knew comets make X-rays, so we hoped that Pluto did, too.”

The main panel in the graphic above is an optical image taken from New Horizons on its approach to Pluto, while the inset shows an image of Pluto in X-rays from Chandra (not to the same scale). This result offers new insight into the environment surrounding the largest and best-known object in the solar system’s outermost regions.​

(NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/CXC)

At a Glance

Researchers have discovered that Pluto is emitting X-rays. The cause may be the interaction between gasses in Pluto's atmosphere and solar wind.

Upon further observations, the researchers discovered that, although it is letting go of enough gas from its atmosphere to make the X-rays, models showing the wind’s intensity at Pluto’s distance isn’t strong enough to create them.

“Before our observations, scientists thought it was highly unlikely that we’d detect X-rays from Pluto, causing a strong debate as to whether Chandra should observe it at all,” study co-author Scott Wolk said in the release. “Prior to Pluto, the most distant solar system body with detected X-ray emission was Saturn’s rings and disk.”

Lisse and his colleagues came up with several possibilities as to how Pluto can send out such enhanced X-ray emissions. According to the release, their suggestions include the small planet having a much wider and longer tail of gasses than previously thought, and that the low density from the solar wind could allow a “doughnut” of neutral gas to form and center around Pluto’s orbit.

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The researchers plan on testing their findings in order to shed even more light on the distant dwarf. They’re particularly interested in studying the interaction between Pluto’s atmospheric gasses and the solar wind.

“When you have a chance at a once-in-a-lifetime flyby like New Horizons at Pluto, you want to point every piece of glass — every telescope on and around Earth — at the target,” co-investigator Ralph McNutt said in the release. “The measurements come together and give you a much more complete picture you couldn’t get at any other time, from anywhere else.”

“We understand that there’s a bit of skepticism,” said Lisse. “We’re going to do some follow-up with a totally different instrument to verify this.”

MORE ON WEATHER.COM: New Horizons Images of Pluto

New Horizons scientists made this false-color image of Pluto using a technique called principal component analysis to highlight the many subtle color differences between Pluto's distinct regions. The image data were collected by the spacecraft’s Ralph/MVIC color camera on July 14 at 11:11 AM UTC, from a range of 22,000 miles (35,000 kilometers). (Credits:NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI)