Ah how I love clickbaitey titles. Anyway: dwarfplanet Ceres, our own little Centaur imported from beyond Jove. The Dawn orbiter found organics, after telling us of that famous saltlick in its Occator crater. As an orbiter and not a driller, the probe could report directly only from the surface.
Now, with AI (preDeepSeek); the Max Planck Institute somehow now involved in planetology has looked into where the organics lie upon Ceres. It's all around certain craters, not around volcanoes. Ceres does have volcanoes, being salty and I assume with some ammonia; water flows at lower Kelvins, perhaps at a thicker viscosity.
All this means that Ceres' surface organics are not from Ceres. They've been delivered from other asteroids. Ceres may host some organics deep beneath, in fact the Planckers assume it probably does; but they're not coming to the surface. Ceres is darker and denser than (much larger) Callisto today but perhaps had more ice where it formed.
So where did the organics form? Plenty of complex hydrocarbons exist on, say, Bennu. As to where Polana's chains started, I'd ask after Sagan's star-tar: the tholin group. They're from even further out than whence Ceres came.
How old are the craters? Can tholins be distinguished from other organics? Is the presence of tholic matter helpful in dating them?
No comments:
Post a Comment