Ceres is doing some home-brewing in the asteroid belt. Organic material has been found on the dwarf planet located between Mars and Jupiter – and it was produced in-house.

Using the Dawn space probe, which has been orbiting Ceres since early 2015, planetary scientists found pockets of carbon-based organic compounds on the surface of the space rock.

The identity of the tar-like minerals can’t be pinned down precisely, but their mineral fingerprints match the make-up of kerite or asphaltite. The constituents and concentrations of these organic materials suggest that it’s unlikely they came to Ceres from another planetary body.


First, they wouldn’t have survived the heat of an impact on the surface of Ceres. And if they had hitched a ride on another stellar object, they would be widely dispersed, rather than concentrated in pockets. That means they must have come from Ceres itself.

“Anything else, you would expect it to be more widespread,” says Michael Küppers at the European Space Agency.

Chris Russell at the University of California, Los Angeles, leads NASA’s Dawn science team and says this finding, along with recent discoveries of water ice and bright spots of mineral deposits on Ceres, points to a more complex picture of the dwarf planet than we once assumed.

“It’s not just an accumulation of rock, but in fact, it’s been doing things,” he says. What it’s doing on the inside is not entirely clear yet, but the organic material on the surface indicates that there are processes within Ceres regulated by heat and water.

On the road

All this might sound like the building blocks for life. But Russell is hesitant to go that far.

“This is a different type of material,” he says. “It’s prebiotic, which means that it’s something you would expect to make before you had biology. It’s sort of on the road to biology.”

Russell says that finding organic materials on Ceres makes it more likely that other asteroids may also harbour similar molecular building blocks.

Küppers agrees, adding that this changes our outlook on potential spots where we may look for life in the solar system.

“A couple of decades ago, when talking about life in the solar system, we were focused on Mars. And now, we are more and more looking at other locations, like Saturn’s moon Titan and the subsurfaces of places like [Jupiter’s moon] Europa,” he says. “And now also Ceres in the asteroid belt.”

Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.aaj2305

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