Scientists Stunned to Find a Secret Ocean World Deep Beneath the Ice in the Asteroid Belt Between Mars and Jupiter

Tucked between Mars and Jupiter lies the asteroid belt, a region that, for decades, has appeared to be nothing more than a pile of rocky debris. Among the mysteries of space, one object has always fascinated experts: Ceres (the belt’s largest body). Since its discovery in 1801, scientists have speculated about its nature. Its heavily cratered surface gave little away until now. In a groundbreaking revelation, experts have uncovered that Ceres is not just another rocky remnant; it is a frozen ocean world, according to Nature.

New research, powered by data from NASA’s Dawn mission and simulations from Purdue University, suggests that up to 90% of Ceres’ outer shell may be made of dirty ice (a mix of frozen water and rocky particles). This discovery flips the long-held assumption that Ceres was mostly solid rock and relatively dry. Mike Sori, assistant professor at Purdue, shared, "We think that there's lots of water-ice near Ceres' surface, and that it gets gradually less icy as you go deeper and deeper," stated The Brighter Side.

Sori and PhD student Ian Pamerleau used computer models to study the way Ceres’ craters behave over billions of years. Surprisingly, they found that deep craters had not changed much, despite the icy composition. This is because the mixture of ice and rock slows the natural flow of material, preserving these features far longer than expected. The team’s results also aligned with mysterious observations made by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, which orbited Ceres from 2015 to 2018. Dawn spotted bright white spots in the Occator Crater, a 22-million-year-old impact site. Experts now believe these spots are sodium carbonate and hydrated salts, the crusty remains of briny liquid water that seeped up through cracks from a subsurface ocean and then evaporated, according to CNN.

Pamerleau noted, "Even solids will flow over long timescales…Ice flows more readily than rock. Craters have deep bowls which produce high stresses that then relax to a lower stress state, resulting in a shallower bowl via solid state flow." This is not the end. What is more shocking is that the salty reservoir beneath the crater is estimated to be 25 miles deep and hundreds of miles wide, hinting at a vast, slushy interior that could still hold liquid water today. Intriguingly, Sori shared, "Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt, and a dwarf planet. I think sometimes people think of small, lumpy things as asteroids (and most of them are!), but Ceres really looks more like a planet," according to The Brighter Side.

Moreover, Sori further asserted, "To me the exciting part of all this, if we're right, is that we have a frozen ocean world pretty close to Earth...Ceres may be a valuable point of comparison for the ocean-hosting icy moons of the outer solar system, like Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's moon Enceladus. Ceres, we think, is therefore the most accessible icy world in the universe. That makes it a great target for future spacecraft missions," according to The Brighter Side. This positions Ceres among the elite club of ocean worlds like Europa and Enceladus, both known for their subsurface oceans. But unlike those icy moons, Ceres is way closer to Earth. If confirmed, there could be some wonders in our understanding of the solar system.