Author Topic: NASA shares its first discoveries about a mysterious ocean world in our Solar System  (Read 315 times)

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Offline Elderberry

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By Strange Sounds -Sep 19, 2020

Deep within the murky recesses of the asteroid belt, there lies a mysterious dwarf planet with properties that has long fascinated astronomers.

A spacecraft orbited the planet for three years from 2015, and it transmitted data back to NASA that seemed to confirm what many had long thought existed in the planet’s core.

The particular planet in question is known as Ceres and it is the biggest object in the Jupiter-Mars asteroid belt.

This makes it the only dwarf planet in our inner solar system.

It was the very first denizen of the asteroid belt to be identified, and it was found by the Catholic priest and astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi way back in 1801.

Interestingly, Ceres was initially designated an asteroid. But then scientists recategorized it as a dwarf planet in 2006, as it was so much bigger than comparable asteroids near it.

Indeed, Ceres makes up 25 percent of the mass of everything in the asteroid belt overall, according to NASA.

In 2018 data from Dawn was analyzed and researchers concluded that Ceres was a rich source of carbon. In fact, it had even more of it than other carbon-rich meteorites found on Earth.

Researchers already knew Ceres was rich in water sources and chemicals such as ammonium, so it gave the dwarf planet an odd chemical structure.

“Our analysis shows that carbon-rich compounds are intimately mixed with products of rock-water interactions – such as clays,” explained Marchi.

“With these findings, Ceres has gained a pivotal role in assessing the origin, evolution and distribution of organic species across the inner solar system. One has to wonder about how this world may have driven organic chemistry pathways, and how these processes may have affected the make-up of larger planets like the Earth.”

The findings had potentially huge implications for the theory that Ceres is a planet that could sustain some form of life.

More: https://strangesounds.org/2020/09/nasa-shares-its-first-discoveries-about-a-mysterious-ocean-world-in-our-solar-system.html