Skip to main content

Dwarf planet Ceres turns out to be an ocean world

Tiny dwarf planet Ceres sits between Mars and Jupiter in the asteroid belt, and this small body turns out to be full of surprises. A new analysis of data collected by NASA’s Dawn mission, which went silent in 2018, suggests that the planet could be an ocean world, despite being far from the sun.

Dawn previously observed white spots on Ceres’s surface which are believed to be evidence of ancient ice volcanoes erupting and spewing cryomagma onto the surface. Now, further data from the mission has been analyzed to show that these patches of sodium carbonate came from a reservoir of briny water beneath the planet’s surface.

A mosaic image using false color
This mosaic image uses false color to highlight the recently exposed brine, or salty liquids, that were pushed up from a deep reservoir under Ceres’ crust. In this view of a region of Occator Crater, they appear reddish. NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

This is especially interesting because Ceres receives little heat from the sun and, unlike other larger planets, is not heated by significant gravitational interactions either. But now scientists know that there is water on the dwarf planet.

Recommended Videos

“For the large deposit at Cerealia Facula, the bulk of the salts were supplied from a slushy area just beneath the surface that was melted by the heat of the impact that formed the crater about 20 million years ago,” Dawn principal investigator Carol Raymond explained in a statement. “The impact heat subsided after a few million years; however, the impact also created large fractures that could reach the deep, long-lived reservoir, allowing brine to continue percolating to the surface.”

mosaic of Ceres' Occator Crater
This mosaic of Ceres’ Occator Crater is composed of images NASA’s Dawn mission captured on its second extended mission, in 2018. Bright pits and mounds (foreground) were formed by salty liquid released as Occator’s water-rich floor froze after the crater-forming impact about 20 million years ago. NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA/USRA/LPI

The fact Dawn is still producing new findings about this body two years after finishing its mission goes to show how much can be learned from these ambitious projects.

“Dawn accomplished far more than we hoped when it embarked on its extraordinary extraterrestrial expedition,” director of the Dawn mission, Marc Rayman of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in the statement. “These exciting new discoveries from the end of its long and productive mission are a wonderful tribute to this remarkable interplanetary explorer.”

Georgina Torbet
Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…
Five rocket launches to look out for in 2024
SpaceX's Starship rocket lifting off in November 2023.

This year promises a bunch of launches featuring new rockets from a range of operators. Let's take a look at five notable rocket launches that are sure to make headlines over the coming months:
ULA’s Vulcan Centaur

The first of these takes place on Monday, January 8, with United Launch Alliance conducting the maiden launch of its brand-new Vulcan Centaur rocket. The 202-feet-tall (61.6-meter) vehicle will launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a mission to become the first to land a privately built lander on the moon.

Read more
Map of Mars shows the location of ice beneath the planet’s surface
In this artist’s concept, NASA astronauts drill into the Martian subsurface. The agency has created new maps that show where ice is most likely to be easily accessible to future astronauts.

One of the challenges of sending human explorers to Mars is that, due to the logistics of the journey, they will have to be on the planet's surface for considerably longer than the missions of a few days which have been sent to the moon in the past. That means future explorers will need access to resources like food, water, and oxygen -- and rather than having to carry months' worth of supplies through space, it's far more efficient to find ways to produce those resources on Mars itself.

That's the idea behind searching for water ice deposits on Mars. There's plenty of ice on the surface around the planet's poles, but most mission concepts are more focused on the planet's equatorial region. The good news is that there is ice present in these areas too, but the bad news is that it's primarily located below the surface and is thus hard to locate.

Read more
Venus, Jupiter, and Ceres feature in NASA’s skywatching tips for March
how to photograph perseid meteor shower night sky with

NASA has just shared its monthly skywatching tips for March, helping us to better understand exactly what we’re looking at when we gaze upward toward a sea of celestial bodies -- provided it isn’t cloudy, that is.
Venus and Jupiter
At the start of this month, Venus and Jupiter appear close together in the night sky, and you can spot both with the naked eye. But as the days go by, the distance between the two planets will open up, with Venus climbing higher and Jupiter gradually heading in the opposite direction.

Jupiter will drop to such an extent that it’ll vanish from sight in the coming weeks. But in May it will return -- in the pre-dawn sky -- along with Saturn.
Moon and Venus
In its monthly update, NASA notes that on March 23 and 24, during the first couple of hours after sunset, the moon will be visible as a slim crescent close to Venus. On March 23 it appears just below the moon, while the very next night it’ll be just above. The following night, on March 25, the moon will its upward trajectory as viewed from Earth, appearing beside the brilliant Pleiades star cluster that evening.
Ceres
With this month seeing crop planting and harvesting activities in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, respectively, NASA suggests the coming weeks as “a fitting time to try and spot the planet named for a mythical goddess of agriculture, grains, and fertile lands. (In addition to being the origin of the word ‘cereal.’)”

Read more