At first glance, the dwarf planet Ceres doesn’t seem like a friendly home for life. It’s small, dark, and scarred by impact craters. Yet a deeper look presents a more optimistic picture. It has more water than any body in the inner solar system besides Earth. It has an abundance of organic compounds – the chemical building blocks of life. And it should be warm enough below the surface to sustain microscopic life.

Ceres is the largest member of the asteroid belt – a wide band of debris between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. It’s about a quarter the diameter of the Moon. It probably consists of a dense core and mantle surrounded by an icy crust.

The Dawn spacecraft studied Ceres from orbit a decade ago. It saw big patches of bright, salty minerals. It also saw mountains, including one that’s three miles high; if you scaled Ceres to the size of Earth, the mountain would be 40 miles high. And the craft discovered that much of the surface consists of minerals that formed in a wet environment. So Ceres has water, heat, and organic compounds – the basic ingredients for life in what looks like an unfriendly world.

Ceres is at a point called opposition – it lines up opposite the Sun in our sky. That means it rises around sunset and is in view all night. It’s also closest to us at opposition, so it shines at its brightest. Even so, you need binoculars or a telescope to pick it out, in the constellation Cetus.

Script by Damond Benningfield