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Hungry for more stories on science, culture and technology?Check out Brain Food: Insights and Discoveries from Northern Arizona. From ground breaking scientific research to global music projects, Brain Food profiles some of the unique projects happening in the region and the interesting people behind them. While there are no new episodes of Brain Food, we will continue to maintain the archive here.

Brain Food: Studying Water In The Solar System

NASA

Space missions are revealing more and more evidence of watery worlds in surprising places. Nadine Barlow is a physics and astronomy professor at Northern Arizona University. She's part of an international panel that studies areas of the solar system where water - and possibly life - may be present.

"There is evidence that we do have liquid water underneath the crusts of several bodies," Barlow says. "For example, at Europa and Ganymede, which are two of Jupiter's moons, there's actually good evidence that there's liquid water at depth."

Barlow and her scientific team also have their sights on Ceres, a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. They suspect there's an underground ocean there.

Barlow says, "We've already seen some bright spots on Ceres, and there's been some debate as to whether or not those are exposed ice, exposed by the cratering into the subsurface water ocean." She adds, "More likely, it seems, these are probably salts that are brought up by that subsurface ocean. The water evaporates and leaves behind salt, and that's something we're going to be watching more closely over the next few months as we start getting more data from Dawn."

Currently, the space probe Dawn is orbiting closer and closer to Ceres, to give scientists a better picture of the dwarf planet's water ways.

Brain Food is produced by KNAU, Arizona Public Radio.