Solar System’s Dwarf Planet Ceres Has An Ancient Ocean

Solar System’s Dwarf Planet Ceres Has An Ancient Ocean
(Source: NASA’s Dawn Mission‏Twitter Handle)

The NASA's Dawn mission to Ceres has found the evidence of residual liquid left over from an ancient global ocean on the dwarf planet that lies between Mars and Jupiter.

Researchers found that Ceres' crust is a mixture of ice, salts and hydrated materials that were subjected to past and possibly recent geologic activity, and that this crust represents most of that ocean.

They suggested that there is a softer, easily deformable layer beneath Ceres' rigid surface crust, which could be the signature of residual liquid.

More and more, 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.
Julie Castillo-Rogez, Dawn Project Scientist, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Researchers led by Anton Ermakov, a postdoctoral researcher at JPL, used shape and gravity data measurements from the Dawn mission to determine the internal structure and composition of Ceres.

The research supports the possibility that Ceres is geologically active - if not now, then it may have been in the recent past. Three craters - Occator, Kerwan and Yalode - and Ceres' solitary tall mountain, Ahuna Mons, are all associated with "gravity anomalies," it said. This means discrepancies between the scientists' models of Ceres' gravity and what Dawn observed in these four locations can be associated with subsurface structures.

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