Organics on Ceres Are From Ceres (not from other impacting bodies)

The organic material on Ceres, while intriguing, appears to be native, rather than delivered from other impactors. So says data from the Southwest Research Institute at the 2017 Astronomical Society meeting. The possibility of simple organic replicators on low-gravity bodies in the solar system ("space viruses", to be dramatic) an interesting one, and is one form (or one part) of the pan-spermia hypothesis that's been considered for over a century, going back at least to Arrhenius. (Space viruses might also be the only evidence we would ever see of alien life or even an alien singularity.) What this tells us is that the large majority of material on Ceres, and presumably on most large old asteroids, is native to those bodies since the dawn of the solar system.

What the findings mean for the "space virus" hypothesis is that we can be more confident that Ceres is not crawling with foreign space viruses - although if there is a replicator that can use the typical organics on large asteroids as building materials, that's not what you would usually see. That is to say, when an organism gets infected by a virus, the organism isn't infiltrated with foreign matter, but rather with a tiny bit of foreign matter that then rearranges the atoms in the organism into copies of itself.