Water Detected on Dwarf Planet Ceres January 22, 2014 The Herschel Space Observatory recently found factual

evidence of the presence of water on Ceres. After observing the dwarf planet for an extended period of time it has seen plumes of water vapor that shoots up from the surface of Ceres when it gets closer to the sun. As it nears the sun the surface gets just warm enough for some of the water to evaporate. Ceres was reclassified from an asteroid to a dwarf planet in 2006 and is theorized to be composed of rock and a thick layer of ice, which if melted would produce more water than is on Earth. The Dawn Missionto explore Ceres more fullyis expected to arrive on the dwarf planet in the spring of 2015. I didnt know much at all about Ceres before reading this article. Being only about 600 miles in size, it seems pretty small in comparison to Earth, and yet it contains so much water! Its really interesting to see how much scientists can deduce from just a couple of small breakthroughs. I just read about the infraredspotting telescopes from the textbook, so it was really cool to read something I knew a little about! I also recently read about the formation of the solar system, the planets and asteroid belt. The article says that Ceres was composed before the other planets were even formed, which I think is really interesting. If its orbit had been just a little different it may have ended up as a planet itself, if it had collided with the right elements. Its also cool to learn that even though Ceres i s so far away its close enough to the sun to occasionally convert ice to gas. http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/22jan_ceres/