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Ceres May Have Been Habitable for Tens of Millions of Years
Researchers have discovered organic compounds, the building blocks of life, near one of the largest craters on the dwarf planet Ceres, which is located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
According to WION, these findings could offer significant insights into Ceres’ potential for harboring life.
Ceres is the largest object in the solar system’s asteroid belt, and beneath its icy surface lie several small reservoirs of saltwater. The discovery, however, was made near the Ertunet crater, where researchers found evidence of aliphatic compounds—organic chemicals that are considered essential for life.
Maria Cristina De Sanctis, a planetologist from Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics, and her team analyzed hundreds of square kilometers surrounding the crater and found it covered in these organic chemicals.
The researchers believe the compounds formed within the past few million years. Since aliphatic compounds are highly vulnerable to radiation, which bombards Ceres’ surface, they conclude that these organics must have emerged from Ceres’ subsurface ocean no later than 10 million years ago.
Using data from NASA’s Dawn mission, which explored Ceres in 2012, the team recreated similar conditions in the lab. By mixing hydrocarbons and aliphatic compounds found near Ertunet crater, they exposed the sample to intense ultraviolet radiation and ion bombardment.
This simulated “space weathering” revealed that such compounds could not survive long on Ceres’ surface under current conditions.
Given the abundance of these organic compounds near the crater, researchers suggest that they were deposited relatively recently, within the last 10 million years.
According to De Sanctis, “The organic compounds discovered near one of Ceres’ craters may have developed during the existence of Ceres’ ancient ocean, which endured for at least several hundred million years.”
Further modeling confirmed that the organic molecules did not originate from asteroid impacts but instead formed deep within Ceres itself. While Ceres once hosted a vast subsurface ocean, only small pockets of it remain today.
Previous studies indicate that interactions between rocks and saltwater are insufficient to generate enough energy to sustain long-term habitability, yet these findings hint at Ceres’ intriguing potential in the distant past.
The post Ceres May Have Been Habitable for Tens of Millions of Years appeared first on Anomalien.com.
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