NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA(NEW YORK) — NASA’s Dawn mission may have discovered remnants of an ancient ocean on the dwarf planet Ceres, the agency said on Thursday.
The information is based on two studies, the first of which found that the planet’s crust “is a mixture of ice, salts and hydrated materials that were subjected to past and possibly recent geological activity.” The second study suggested that a softer layer beneath Ceres’ crust “could be the signature of residual liquid left over from the ocean, too.”
“More and more,” Dawn project scientist and co-author of the studies Julie Castillo-Rogez said, “we are learning that Ceres is a complex dynamic world that may have hosted a lot of liquid water in the past, and may still have some underground.”
According to a news release, the Dawn team “thinks most of Ceres’ ancient ocean is now frozen and bound up in the crust, remaining in the form of ice, clathrate hydrates and salts,” and that “it has mostly been that way for more than four billion years.”
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