Rivers and lakes of liquid nitrogen may have splashed over Pluto’s surface hundreds of millions of years ago, and could do so again, due to shifts in the dwarf planet’s orbit and the tilt of its orbit.
That hypothesis is a good fit for the evidence collected last July when NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft zoomed past the dwarf planet and its moons, scientists said today.
Today’s revelations came during a review of New Horizons’ findings at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas. Research teams shared their latest findings about the mission, including some that have yet to be published in journals such as Icarus.
