New analysis of the solar system's largest asteroid shows Ceres to shoot out puffs of water vapor into space, BBC News reported.

Scientists already theorized the space rock was made up of a significant amount of ice, but the study, published in the journal Nature, shows for the first time such releases. Observing Ceres with the ESA's Herschel infrared telescope, some experts believe the sun could be warming ice enough to cause it to escape into space as a gas.

"Another possibility," ESA's Michael Kuppers, the study's lead author, told BBC News, "is that there is still some energy in the interior of Ceres, and this energy would make the water vent out in a similar way as for geysers on Earth, only that with the low pressure at the surface of the asteroid, what comes out would be a vapor and not a liquid."

Currently, scientists do not have a much better glimpse of Ceres than what NASA's Hubble Telescope has already provided. Since Herschel's observation was made prior to its decommissioning last year, it cannot make a follow-up. However, NASA's Dawn probe is set to get a good look at Ceres in 2015.

"We've got a spacecraft on the way to Ceres, so we don't have to wait long before getting more context on this intriguing result, right from the source itself," Carol Raymond, the deputy principal investigator for Dawn at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a news release. "Dawn will map the geology and chemistry of the surface in high resolution, revealing the processes that drive the outgassing activity."

Ceres is a bit confusing, Kuppers told BBC News, in terms of why it appears to be much more rich in water-ice than its neighbors. He said Ceres originally formed much further from the sun before moving in closer, supporting the theory stating its ice is being released as a water vapor due to warmth.

Said Kuppers, "We now have a more sophisticated model for the evolution of the Solar System called the Nice model, which successfully explains many of the features of the Solar System, with the planets having migrated outwards and then maybe also inwards."