Ceres may have been habitable at just half a billion years old
A billion or so years into its evolution, the icy dwarf planet Ceres may have had the right conditions to sustain life, which indicates the solar system may be more habitable than we thought
By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan
20 August 2025
The icy dwarf planet Ceres may once have been habitable
NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)
The dwarf planet Ceres looks cold and dead, but a billion or so years after its formation, it may have had a warm interior that made it habitable.
Sam Courville at Arizona State University says he can’t speculate on whether life ever arose on Ceres – but had this happened, the dwarf planet’s past environment may have enabled that life to survive.
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Previous research has indicated there could be water ice and organic molecules on Ceres, pointing towards the possibility of life. But in this study, the researchers focused on what these alien life forms would have eaten. They considered microbes like those that live in hydrothermal vents in Earth’s oceans and extract energy directly from chemical molecules, rather than from consuming other organisms. Could similar microbes have survived in the oceans of ancient Ceres?
The team modelled Ceres’s past on a computer, finding that when it was between half a billion and 2 billion years old, pores close to its hot core could have released fluids that then mixed with the colder water in its oceans. That process could have delivered the chemical “food” that microbes would have needed.
If we want to find evidence of past or current life in our solar system, says Amanda Hendrix at the Planetary Science Institute, we need to look to worlds like Ceres that have – or once had – oceans.
