A team of scientists, using NASA data, has identified a new family of asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter that is rich in water and very similar to the dwarf planet Ceres.
The discovery, made from measurements made at NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii, will help us better understand the formation of the solar system and the movement dynamics of asteroids.
Water carriers
The research supports the idea that life was brought to Earth from very distant rocks in an otherwise arid part of the solar system: ours.
“They are part of the type of objects that entered the solar system and brought ice and organic materials with them.” To say it is Andy Rivkin, planetary astronomer at John Hopkins University. “Their cousins may have hit Earth and brought some back, just as they hit Mars.”
A systematic review
The team from Heidelberg University, Germany, led by prof. Driss Takir, conducted an observation on the origin of some celestial bodies present in the main asteroid belt.
Using computer simulations, German scientists examined how these asteroids might have moved from the outer solar system to their current position. Among the most interesting, those that "mimic" the composition of a planet that has only recently become very famous.
The study was published this week in Nature Astronomy (I link it here).
Why exactly Ceres?
Ceres, a cosmic object 800 kilometers wide and located over 400 million kilometers from the Sun, hit the headlines in 2006, when the scientific community promoted it to a dwarf planet, simultaneously with the declassification of Pluto.
The new class of Ceres-like asteroids, rich in water and carbon, possess the same essential ingredients for life on Earth. “Especially asteroid 10 Hygiea, the largest dark Ceres-like asteroid with a nearly spherical shape,” says Takir. “We will need high-resolution space observations to look for water ice on these asteroids.”
And there will be, rest assured: this new research has certainly opened the way to new hypotheses and research on the possibility that extraterrestrial water is present here with us.
