NASA Reveals Findings from Journey to Mysterious World of Ceres

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Soycow_Lover:

Nasa reveals findings from journey to mysterious world at the edge of solar system:

Nasa has revealed its observations from a trip to Ceres[*], the mysterious world hovering at the edge of our solar system.

Ceres is a dwarf planet, and the largest of the huge number of objects that are found in the asteroid belt at the far reaches of our planetary neighbourhood.

Now scientists using data from Nasa observations of the world have revealed a host of new information about that distant dwarf planet.

[...] "Long believed to be a primitive body, Ceres is now an ocean world with deep brines at a regional and potentially global scale," wrote Nasa's Julie Castillo-Rogez, a planetary scientist who did not work on the study. She urged more research and a follow-up mission that could study the evolution of the planet - and its "potential habitability".

[...] The research shows that Ceres is an ocean world, and that it may have been geologically active in the recent past.

And it also adds yet more wonder to the planet, suggesting that the various glowing parts of the surface were formed from different sources.

The findings are discussed in seven new papers published in Nature journals, offering a variety of new information about the dwarf planet.

[*] From the Ceres entry on Wikipedia:

Ceres (/sriz/;[16] minor-planet designation: 1 Ceres) is the largest object in the main asteroid belt that lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. With a diameter of 940 km (580 mi), Ceres is both the largest of the asteroids and the only dwarf planet inside Neptune's orbit. It is the 25th-largest body in the Solar System within the orbit of Neptune.

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