Author: Lisa Grossman / Source: Science News
Ceres may be regularly coughing up briny water or slush onto its surface.
The discovery of waterlogged minerals and a growing ice wall suggests that the dwarf planet could harbor underground liquid water or slushy brine, which has escaped through cracks and craters in the recent past and may still be seeping out today.
The findings, reported in two papers published online March 14 in Science Advances, add to a growing realization that Ceres is geologically active — and may point to new signs of the dwarf planet’s potential to host the ingredients for life.“We thought of Ceres as a dead body like our moon,” says Andrea Raponi, a coauthor of both studies and a planetary scientist at the Institute for Space Astrophysics and Planetology in Rome. The growing body of evidence “means that Ceres is geologically alive, active, in our days.”
Since 2015, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has orbited Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The mission has previously revealed Ceres has water ice in shadowed regions of its craters and a few meters below the surface (SN: 1/21/17, p. 8). The dwarf planet also has what look like cryovolcanoes, which spew slushy water instead of magma.
Now, scientists have used data from Dawn to make the first global map of surface carbonate minerals, which form in the presence of liquid water. In one of the new papers, the team reports finding hydrated sodium carbonate — versions of the minerals that still have water molecules attached.
The post Dwarf planet Ceres may store underground brine that still gushes up today appeared first on FeedBox.