The dwarf planet Ceres might be home to an underground ocean of water | MIT Technology Review

The dwarf planet Ceres might be home to an underground ocean of water | MIT Technology Review

Swimming on Ceres

The dwarf planet Ceres seemingly has a salty ocean of water beneath its surface. The ocean is the source of mysterious bright areas spotted on the distant world’s surface. Images from NASA's Dawn spacecraft, which dipped to less than 35 kilometers above Ceres’s surface on its 2018 mission, reveal the areas are deposits of mostly sodium carbonate. These were formed as briny water percolated up to the surface and then evaporated. “Ceres is now an ocean world,” writes planetary scientist Julie Castillo-Rogez in the Nature Astronomy News & Views article accompanying the research.

MIT Technology Review | 4 min readReference: Nature Astronomy paper