New NASA research hints that Ceres — the closest dwarf planet to Earth — may have once had an ancient "power source" that could have sparked the evolution of extraterrestrial life-forms in the tiny world's hidden ocean.
Ceres is the largest object within the solar system's main asteroid belt, which is located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The wee world is around 600 miles (950 kilometers) wide, roughly one-quarter the moon's diameter, meaning it is not large enough to be considered a planet. But it is large enough to be considered a "dwarf planet" like Pluto, which lost its full planetary status in 2006.
