So, here’s the last, clearest image of Pluto taken by space probe New Horizons before today’s flyby.

She’s pink. With a giant heart.

I’m not sure why this gets to me, but it does. At the edge of the Solar System, which I’d always known as being awfully dark and awfully cold, is this massive celestial emblem of Love orbiting her inner neighbours, which we never recognised because we’d never seen it.

I know I’m seeing what I want to see (like the Martian “face”), and the giant icy heart may be a dynamic formation and change eventually (like Jupiter’s Red Spot and Neptune’s blue one).

But it’s things like this, seeing the unexpected in the most unlikely place, and a surpassingly positive thing, that makes me feel sometimes that we’re all going to be all right after all.

(Image by NASA and the universe. Public domain!)