The heart-shaped feature on Pluto’s surface — which itself got a lot of love from Pluto-watchers worldwide this week — will be named for the Kansas University alumnus who discovered the celestial body.

NASA on Wednesday released preliminary reports and images from Tuesday’s historic New Horizons spacecraft fly-by, which provided an unprecedented up-close view of Pluto.

The New Horizons team also announced the feature informally known as the “heart” would be named “Tombaugh Regio” after Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto in 1930, according to media reports from a NASA briefing on Wednesday.

This July 13, 2015, image provided by NASA shows Pluto from the New Horizons spacecraft. The United States is now the only nation to visit every single planet in the solar system. Pluto was No. 9 in the lineup when New Horizons departed Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Jan. 19, 2006.

In this 1980 photo provided by Dale Wittner, Clyde Tombaugh is shown in Las Cruces, N.M., with a telescope similar to one he used to find Pluto decades earlier.

A new close-up image, released by NASA on Wednesday, July 15, 2015, of a region near Pluto’s equator reveals a giant surprise: a range of youthful mountains rising as high as 11,000 feet above the surface of the icy body. The close-up image was taken about 1.5 hours before New Horizons' closest approach to Pluto, when the craft was 47,800 miles from the surface of the planet.

That makes sense, said Kansas University physics and astronomy professor Bruce Twarog.

Tombaugh inspired generations of planetary scientists “who were willing to look beyond the big, bright and obvious to achieve a deeper understanding of the solar system,” Twarog said.

Not only did Tombaugh discover Pluto, Twarog said, he maintained Pluto’s profile for decades and deserves credit for the fact that people continue to study it.

Tombaugh grew up on a farm near Burdett, Kan., and had hopes of attending KU, but a hailstorm that wiped out his crops left him with no money for college, according to Mike Reid, director of the KU History Project.

“He saw an ad in an astronomy magazine that there was a part-time position at Lowell Observatory,” Reid said. “So he wrote them with some of his observations, and they hired him. There, he discovered Pluto.”

With his pay from Lowell and a scholarship from KU, Reid said, Tombaugh returned to Kansas and enrolled at KU, where he received his bachelor’s degree in 1936 and master’s in 1939.

Pluto was long considered the ninth planet, but in 2006 was reclassified to a new category of bodies called dwarf planets.

The mysterious “heart” shows prominently in a pre-fly-by photo NASA released on Monday.

NASA describes it as a “large, bright feature,” measuring about 1,000 miles across and with an interior that “appears remarkably featureless — possibly a sign of ongoing geologic processes.”

More details about the heart and the rest of the planet should emerge from the fly-by.

Preliminary images and information NASA released this week — including an up-close shot showing mountains on Pluto’s icy surface — is exciting for the public but more like a teaser for scientists, Twarog said.

NASA is expected to release a few more photos in coming days, but the bulk of the data won’t be available for months. Studying that will change our understanding of the planet, Twarog said.

“The images coming back are spectacular,” he said. “The science is going to be even more important.”