NASA scientists have done fresh study that gives Ceres, the dwarf planet in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, a new, hopeful look. The study looks at data from NASA’s breakthrough Dawn mission again and concludes that Ceres may have had the right circumstances for single-celled life to exist between 2.5 and 4 billion years ago.
The results, which were led by Samuel W. Courville from Arizona State University, go against what people thought they knew about Ceres’s past. Scientists thought Ceres was too frigid to have a liquid water interior when the Dawn probe investigated the dwarf planet from 2015 to 2018. This ruled it out as a possible “ocean world” like moons like Europa and Enceladus.
But this new study, which was out on August 20 in the journal Science Advances, gives us a more hopeful view. The researchers suggest that the planetoid’s interior may have been significantly warmer in the past by utilizing advanced thermal and chemical models. This ancient temperature may have kept a continual flow of hot water below the surface, making the area perhaps livable.
The Dawn mission didn’t uncover proof of a currently active subsurface ocean, but it did find important indicators that Ceres used to have liquid water. The probe found salts and organic chemicals on the surface of the dwarf planet, which are thought to be important for life. This current study builds on these results and suggests that this old hydrothermal activity may have made it possible for single-celled organisms to grow and thrive.
This new point of view makes a strong case for rethinking Ceres’s history and its possible role in supporting life. Ceres’s possible habitability would have come from its own internal thermal activity in the distant past, unlike other “ocean worlds” that are kept alive by heat from radioactive decay or tidal pressures from a parent planet. This discovery adds to the continuing hunt for life beyond Earth in an interesting way.