NASA: Ceres May Have Had Long-Standing Energy to Fuel Habitability

The dwarf planet is cold now, but new research depicts an image of ceres hosting a deep and long lifespan source of energy which may have maintained habitable conditions in the past.

New NASA research has shown that Céres may have had a lasting source of chemical energy: the good types of molecules necessary to feed certain microbial metabolisms. Although there is no evidence that microorganisms have ever existed on Ceres, discovery supports the theories that this intriguing dwarf planet, which is the largest body of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, may have had suitable conditions to support unicellular life forms.

The scientific data of the Dawn mission of NASA, which ended in 2018, previously shown that the shiny and reflective regions on the surface of ceres are mainly made of salts left from liquid that have been percolated from the metro. Subsequent analysis in 2020 revealed that the source of this liquid was a huge tank of brine or salt water, below the surface. In other research, the Dawn mission has also revealed evidence that Ceres has organic material in the form of carbon molecules – essential, but not sufficient alone, to support microbial cells.

The presence of water and carbon molecules is two critical pieces of the habitability puzzle in Ceres. The new discoveries offer the third: a lasting source of chemical energy in the ancient past of Ceres which could have allowed microorganisms to survive. This result does not mean that Ceres had life, but rather that there was probably “food” available if life had already taken place in Ceres.

In the study, published in Science Advances on August 20, the authors built thermal and chemical models imitating the temperature and composition of the interior of ceres over time. They found that around 2.5 billion years ago, the underground ocean of Ceres may have had a regular supply of hot water containing dissolved gases traveling from rocks metamorphosed in the rocky nucleus. The heat came from the decrease of the radioactive elements of the rocky interior of the dwarf planet which occurred when Ceres was young – an internal process considered as current in our solar system.

“On earth, when hot water in the deep subsoil mixes with the ocean, the result is often a buffet for microbes – a festival of chemical energy. It could therefore have great implications if we could determine whether the ocean of Ceres had an influx of hydrothermal liquid in the past,” said Sam Courville, the main author of the study. Now based on Arizona State University in Tempe, he led research while working as an intern with the NASA laboratory propulsion in Southern California, which also managed the Dawn mission.

It is unlikely that the CERES we know today will be habitable. It is cooler, with more ice and less water than in the past. The heat is currently insufficient for radioactive disintegration in CERES to prevent freezing water, and what the liquid remains has become a concentrated brine.

The period when Ceres would probably have been habitable was between half a billion and 2 billion years after its training (about 2.5 to 4 billion years), when its rocky nucleus reached its cutting-edge temperature. It was at this time that hot fluids were introduced into the groundwater of Ceres.

The dwarf planet also does not have the advantage of the current internal heating generated by the push and the attraction of the orbitry of a large planet, as the moon of Saturn and the Moon of Jupiter. Thus, the greatest potential for combustion energy of the habitability of Ceres was in the past.

This result also has implications for objects rich in water throughout the external solar system. Many other frozen moons and dwarf planets which are of similar size to Ceres (approximately 585 miles, or 940 kilometers, in diameter) and have no significant internal heating from the gravitational attraction of the planets could also have had a period of habitability in their past.

Division from Caltech to Pasadena, JPL managed Dawn’s mission for the NASA scientific mission management in Washington. Dawn was a project of the management program, managed by the Marshall Space Flight Center of NASA in Huntsville, in Alabama. JPL was responsible for the science of Dawn Mission Global. Northrop Grumman in Dulles, Virginia, designed and built the spaceship. The German aerospace center, the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, the Italian space agency and the Italian National Institute Astrophysics were international partners of the mission team.

For a complete list of mission participants, visit:

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/mission/dawn/overview/

Gretchen McCartney
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.
818-287-4115
gretchen.p.mcarttney@jpl.nasa.gov

Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
NASA seat, Washington

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