After a closer look at our distant friend Pluto, new research shows that the planet has tropic and arctic regions and an atmosphere that fluctuates over time, which may allow lakes and rivers of liquid nitrogen to form at the surface.

With the New Horizons spacecraft sending back less than half of the data it collected from the pass it took near Pluto around eight months ago, new findings, like that of the liquid on the icy planet’s surface, are being pieced together.

New Horizons scientists Alan Stern and Richard Binzel claim their research shows that the planet’s exaggerated tilt alters Pluto’s atmosphere over time, allowing for liquid nitrogen to flow once—or multiple times—across the planet’s surface.

"Liquids may have existed on the surface of Pluto in the past," said Stern, the New Horizons mission leader, during the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas.

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Binzel said a period of extreme tilt around 800 or 900 million years ago may have been dramatic enough to expose an area of the planet’s surface to consistent sunlight for a long enough period of time.

“If you were to have a flyby at one of those epochs, millions or billions of years ago, you might have seen, for example, that lake reflecting sunlight specularly at you, because that surface is liquid rather than frozen as it is today,” said Stern.

If the phenomenon were to be true, it would explain the sporadic spots on the planet’s surface that resemble frozen lakes or rivers.

In comparison to the Earth’s 23-degree tilt, Pluto’s tilt of axis is currently at a whopping 123 degrees, according to Windows to the Universe.

This means Pluto’s arctic zone, where the sun never sets during the planet’s summer season, and its tropical zone, where the sun is directly overhead at some point during the planet’s orbit, are constantly overlapping, says GeekWire.

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The research suggests that Pluto’s tilt was even more extreme further back in time due to Milankovitch cycles, which refer to the long-term variations in a planet’s orbit that result in climate change over a wide period of time—like that which caused Earth’s ice age cycles.

These climate shifts would have affected Pluto’s nitrogen-rich atmosphere, which could have been denser than that of Mars, said Stern.

The readings from the New Horizon will continue to be downlinked from the spacecraft, currently 180 million miles beyond Pluto, according to the spacecraft's website.

“We are just beginning to understand the long-term climate of Pluto,” said Binzel.

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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)