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Asteroids might look dry and barren, but the Solar System’s biggest asteroid — Ceres — is chock full of water, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has found.
“It’s just oozing,” says Thomas Prettyman, a nuclear engineer at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona. He led the team that built the neutron-counting instrument aboard Dawn, which reported its findings on 15 December in Science1.
Today, the water is either frozen as ice, filling pore spaces deep inside Ceres, or locked inside hydrated minerals at the surface. But billions of years ago, early in Ceres’s history, heat left over from the Solar System’s formation probably kept the asteroid warm inside. This allowed the water to churn and flow, helping to separate Ceres into layers of rock and ice.
“We know the water and the rock have separated and interacted over time,” said Carol Raymond, a planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco on 15 December.
The discovery adds to a growing awareness of Ceres as an active, wet world that pushes the boundary of what it means to be a planet. Today it sports a 4-kilometre-high ice volcano and bright spots of salt mixed with ice and rock.
Read more here. (Nature)
“It’s just oozing,” says Thomas Prettyman, a nuclear engineer at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona. He led the team that built the neutron-counting instrument aboard Dawn, which reported its findings on 15 December in Science1.
Today, the water is either frozen as ice, filling pore spaces deep inside Ceres, or locked inside hydrated minerals at the surface. But billions of years ago, early in Ceres’s history, heat left over from the Solar System’s formation probably kept the asteroid warm inside. This allowed the water to churn and flow, helping to separate Ceres into layers of rock and ice.
“We know the water and the rock have separated and interacted over time,” said Carol Raymond, a planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco on 15 December.
The discovery adds to a growing awareness of Ceres as an active, wet world that pushes the boundary of what it means to be a planet. Today it sports a 4-kilometre-high ice volcano and bright spots of salt mixed with ice and rock.
Read more here. (Nature)
