A hidden ocean on dwarf planet Ceres may have churned up some of the ingredients for life relatively recently.
The largest object in our Solar System’s asteroid belt, dwarf planet Ceres, hides small underground lakes of salt water ocean beneath an icy surface crusted with salts and stained with hydrocarbons. Around one of the dwarf planet’s largest craters, Ertunet Crater, a layer of organic chemicals (called aliphatics) covers hundreds of square miles. And those materials must have gotten there fairly recently, because a recent study found that aliphatic compounds break down very quickly under the constant bombardment of radiation in deep space. That suggests that these organic molecules formed in Ceres’s underground ocean within the last 10 million years or so.
