Scientists discover geothermal activity on Ceres

Using data from NASA’s Dawn probe, scientists have discovered evidence of geothermal activity on Ceres, the largest object in the Solar System’s asteroid belt.

The NASA’s probe’s visible and infrared mapping spectrometer allowed the researcher to identify a high concentration of carbonate minerals indicative of geothermal activity within Ceres’ Occator Crater, according to the team’s report in the journal Nature.

“This is the first time we see this kind of material elsewhere in the solar system in such a large amount,” study author Maria Cristina De Sanctis, from National Institute of Astrophysics in Rome, said in a news release.

Discovery could explain the bright Occator crater

At around 80 million years old, Occator is a young crater. It is 57 miles wide, with a central pit around 6 miles wide. A dome shape at the middle is coated in highly reflective material and has radial and concentric cracks on and around it.

The new study finds the dominant mineral within this bright spot is sodium carbonate, a type of salt seen on Earth in hydrothermal environments. This material may have come from inside Ceres, because an asteroid could not have caused it, the study team said.

An upwelling of material indicates that temperatures inside Ceres are warmer than earlier believed. An asteroid slamming into Ceres may have played a role bringing this material up from below, but scientists think an internal mechanism played a part as well.

The study’s outcomes indicate liquid water may have recently been beneath the exterior of Ceres. The salts might be remnants of an ocean, or smaller bodies of water, that reached the exterior and then froze millions of years ago.

“The minerals we have found at the Occator central bright area require alteration by water,” De Sanctis said. “Carbonates support the idea that Ceres had interior hydrothermal activity, which pushed these materials to the surface within Occator.”

Last year, the same research team reported the exterior of Ceres has ammoniated phyllosilicates, or clays containing ammonia. Because ammonia is found throughout the outer solar system, this finding suggested Ceres either formed near the orbit of Neptune and migrated inward, or formed close to its present position between Mars and Jupiter, but attracted material from the outer solar system.

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Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA/PSI/LPI

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