December 18, 2016

Scheme of water molecules falling into cold traps on Ceres (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA)

Two articles published in the magazines “Science” and “Nature Astronomy” describe two studies also presented at the American Geophysical Union meeting taking place in San Francisco that reported new evidence of the presence of water ice below the surface of the dwarf planet Ceres. The researchers used the data collected by NASA’s Dawn space probe to find two sets of evidence that in Ceres’s subsoil there’s more ice than expected and that it can exist for a very long time.