There's one thing Pluto has in common with our Earth: a blue sky.

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft studied the dwarf planet over the summer, and the ship collected so much data and imagery that the administration's scientists are still sifting through it all. In an image released Thursday, we can see in color for the first time that Pluto's skies are bright blue.

Pluto’s haze layer shows its blue color in this picture taken by the New Horizons Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC).

(NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI)

“Who would have expected a blue sky in the Kuiper Belt? ,” Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement.

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The reason for Pluto's blue sky is much like the process that gives Earth a similar shading, NASA said. Organic molecules in Pluto's atmosphere known as tholins are likely either gray or red, NASA said, but they scatter light in blue wavelengths, giving the sky its bluish tint.

“A blue sky often results from scattering of sunlight by very small particles," said science team researcher Carly Howett, also of SwRI, in the NASA release. "On Earth, those particles are very tiny nitrogen molecules. On Pluto they appear to be larger — but still relatively small — soot-like particles we call tholins.”

The news comes a month after NASA released color images of the dwarf planet, which showed a large swath of the surface . That red area is actually ice; the tholin particles get coated in frost while they condense and fall to the surface, NASA said. They're still not sure, however, why the ice is red.

Pluto is , according to Space.com. Pluto's temperatures range from 369 degrees below zero Fahrenheit , a separate Space.com report said.

MORE ON WEATHER.COM: 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)