Abhay Singh
According to a new study published in the journal Science Advances, researchers suggest that the asteroid belt located between Mars and Jupiter could be containing the fundamental elements required for life to form.
The study points out that the dwarf planet Ceres, situated in this region, is holding a secret ocean that may be nurturing the necessary components for life’s emergence.
Ceres is the largest object in our Solar System’s asteroid belt
The most exciting discovery has been uncovered near one of Ceres’s greatest craters, the Ertunet Crater. Ceres is the largest object in our Solar System’s asteroid belt, and its frozen surface conceals numerous small subterranean water bodies containing salt water.
Here, planetary scientist Maria Cristina De Sanctis of Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics and her associates discovered the building blocks of life.
The region surrounding this crater is coated in hundreds of square miles of what are known as aliphatics, or organic compounds. According to research, the compounds could only have developed during the last few million years or so.
This is due to the fact that aliphatic molecules are unable to withstand the prolonged, continuous radiation bombardment found in deep space. They have concluded that, within the last 10 million years or so, these organic compounds evolved in Ceres’s subterranean ocean.
There is an abundance of this type of hydrocarbon on its surface
In their lab, De Sanctis and her colleagues used information from NASA’s Dawn probe, which passed by the dwarf planet in 2012, to build the Ceres sediment. They mixed with the hydrocarbon found close to the Ertunet Crater, known as aliphatic organics.
They blasted strong UV radiation and quickly traveled ions into the mixture to determine how long they had been there.
Organic molecules may be broken down by this process known as “space weathering.” As it turned out, the aliphatic compounds were also short-lived, which led the researchers to conclude that the material had not been on Ceres for very long.
Because of the quantity of this kind of hydrocarbon on its surface, scientists surmise that it has only been there for the past 10 million years.
De Sanctis and her colleagues wrote “The organic compounds found at the Ertunet Crater might have evolved over the life span of Ceres’s deep ocean, lasting at least a few hundred million years,”
Furthermore, simulations indicate that these organic molecules originated deep within Ceres, where only pockets of its once-vast ocean of salt water remain; earlier research suggests that interactions between the salt water and rock may have released enough energy to form these tiny pockets of habitability. Ceres was once covered in a vast ocean of salt water beneath its crust.
They wrote “This makes the region a preferred site for a future in situ or sample return mission to Ceres,”
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