Dwarf planet Ceres has reservoirs of salty water



	August 12, 2020

The dwarf planet Ceres turns out has salty water that is underneath the ground.
While this global ocean beneath the planet's surface likely froze over time, remnants of it may still be present beneath a large impact crater on Ceres. The presence of salts may have preserved the liquid as a brine, despite cold temperatures.
The new information comes from analyzing old data that was given by a Nasa Spacecraft.
Nasa’s Dawn mission collected data from 2018 About Cerses’ gravity showing us that there is a 40 kilometers deep and hundreds of miles wide of water that appears underneath a giant crater known as Occator, showing us that the violent impact had a long impact on Ceres’ history.

Carol Raymond, Dawn principle investigators, said in the NASA statement:

"The bulk of the salts were supplied from a slushy area just beneath the surface, that was melted by the heat of the impact that formed the crater about 20 million years ago."

Ceres was the first object discovered in the main asteroid belt, a vast region containing planet building blocks encircling the Sun — leftovers from the formation of the Solar System — between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Now referred to as a dwarf planet, like Pluto, Ceres is named after the Roman goddess of agriculture.