New research suggests that distant worlds such as Pluto and others such as Eris could have watery oceans sloshing beneath their icy exterior.

Lead author Prabal Saxena, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said: "These objects need to be considered as potential reservoirs of water and life.

"If our study is correct, we now may have more places in our solar system that possess some of the critical elements for extraterrestrial life."

Underground oceans are believed to exist on some moons within our solar system, such as Saturn’s Titan and Enceladus and Jupiter’s Europa, Callisto and Ganymede.

Oceans in these places are kept in liquid form, rather than freezing, due to a process known as “tidal healing” – where the gravitational pull of the moons’ planets stretches the lunar satellites’ interior, causing it to heat enough to keep water in that state.

Researchers suggest that a similar process could be taking place on dwarf planets such as Pluto, Eris and other trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) – worlds beyond Neptune.

The team state that the moons around these dwarf planets are pulling on them gravitationally – and vice versa – which is allowing the celestial body’s interior to heat.

Study co-author Wade Henning, of NASA Goddard and the University of Maryland, said: "We found that tidal heating can be a tipping point that may have preserved oceans of liquid water beneath the surface of large TNOs like Pluto and Eris to the present day.”

Joe Renaud, of George Mason University in Virginia and co-author, added: "Crucially, our study also suggests that tidal heating could make deeply buried oceans more accessible to future observations by moving them closer to the surface.

"If you have a liquid-water layer, the additional heat from tidal heating would cause the next adjacent layer of ice to melt."