Posted on 08/10/2020 4:46:24 PM PDT by NRx
The dwarf planet Ceres – long believed to be a barren space rock – is an ocean world with reservoirs of sea water beneath its surface, the results of a major exploration mission showed on Monday.
Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and has its own gravity, enabling the Nasa Dawn spacecraft to capture high-resolution images of its surface.
Now a team of scientists from the United States and Europe have analysed images relayed from the orbiter, captured about 35km (22 miles) from the asteroid.
They focused on the 20-million-year-old Occator crater and determined that there is an “extensive reservoir” of brine beneath its surface.
Several studies published on Monday in the journals Nature Astronomy, Nature Geoscience and Nature Communications also shed further light on the dwarf planet, which was discovered by the Italian polymath Giuseppe Piazzi in 1801.
Using infrared imaging, one team discovered the presence of the compound hydrohalite – a material common in sea ice but which until now had never been observed off of Earth.
Maria Cristina De Sanctis, from Rome’s Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica said hydrohalite was a clear sign Ceres used to have sea water.
“We can now say that Ceres is a sort of ocean world, as are some of Saturn’s and Jupiter’s moons,” she told AFP.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
Ceres is a planet now? I thought it was classified as an asteroid.
I just tsunamied in my pants
Any clues as to how it got the water? Or for that matter how we got any.
Like Europa I guess ?
“This teraforming is trickier than it looks.”
You just need a Scott’s rotary spreader and about 6 x 10^23 bags of Milorganite.
I remember back in the olden days when the media hired people called “editors” who they paid to read articles before they were published to make sure they were accurate or at least that they made sense. Now they just throw articles onto the interweb and have readers beta test them for free.
I can usually figure out what a writer intended to say in a mangled sentence but I honestly have no clue what the writer of this article meant about Ceres having “its own gravity, enabling the Nasa Dawn spacecraft to capture high-resolution images of its surface.” Aside from the fact that every object has its own gravity, what does that have to do with the ability to take high resolution photos?
Yes it is - be nice to see Pluto still called a planet. If they really want to be strict, Mercury could be demoted to a dwarf planet as well since it is smaller than the moons Titan and Ganymede, which would leave 7 planets. Probably shouldn't give them any ideas.
Ceres, the beer planet.
According to a quick search, Ceres gravity is around 1/36 of Earth’s.
So someone with a 2 ft vertical leap on Earth would be able to jump somewhere around 70 ft vertically (is that in Expanse? heh) accounting for air resistance.
Slow motion beer pours as well...
Exciting news about the water, Ceres might well be an important spaceport someday. Everywhere in the solar system will be inhabitable, because all that’s needed is energy and that’s ultimately plentiful.
Elon Musk has been doing some trailblazing, but personally I’m most excited about new propulsion advances and the first large nuclear drive spacecraft. Those will open up the Solar System!
The simple explanation is that Hydrogen and Oxygen are common in the Universe, and like to get together, as H2O or as water precursors known as hydroxides. The materials the early Solar System formed out of included H and O, others contained H, O, H2O, and hydroxides. Earth is not even particularly “wet” compared to some other Solar System bodies (some moons, Uranus, Neptune, and perhaps worlds like Ceres?) We just happen to have much of our water on or near the surface.
Early Earth would not have had much in the way of free water, as the surface was molten, and most of the atmosphere is believed to have been blown off by the collision that created Earth’s Moon, but once a crust formed, the rain (reign?) of meteorites, asteroids, and to a lesser degree, comets, over the eons brought in lots of H2O and precursors. (”Type 1” meteorites are highest at ~20% water or precursors.*)
*If you want some rather “thick” reading (or at least I found it so) there is this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroidal_water
Hope this helps!
:^) When the next interstellar bombardment arrives, basically without warning, whatever civilization arises long after will have to go through all this again, possibly with some escaped moons they'll have to make a decision about.
Meanwhile, ending a sentence with a preposition, as I just did, is something up with which we should not put.
If you don't have gravity the pictures become very fuzzy and indistinct. Because slavery and racism.
The rest of the Ceres keyword, chrono:
Must have been quite a lot, seeing as most incoming these days burns up on the way in. You would think any water would dry up pretty fast...Instead we have many quintillions of gallons. Hmmm.
Thanks for the link! Thick reading often has the most protein. :)
Water vapor is a combustion product in many cases. More water vapor* eventually leads (usually) to more precipitation.
*Granted that individual water molecules at great altitude likely escape to space. But other stuff gets through. And, yes, in the past there was a lot more clutter in the neighborhood.
Eros
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