A NASA spacecraft has detected carbon-based materials on the Texas-sized dwarf planet Ceres, which orbits between Mars and Jupiter in the main asteroid belt, scientists said on Thursday.
The finding puts Ceres, a rock-and-ice world about 950km in diameter, on a list of places in the solar system beyond Earth that have the compounds, including Mars and several moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
The discovery, published in the journal Science, was made by a team of researchers using NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, which has been orbiting Ceres for nearly two years.
Photo: Reuters
“I think these organic molecules are a long way from microbial life,” Dawn lead scientist Christopher Russell of the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) wrote in an e-mail to reporters. “However, this discovery tells us that we need to explore Ceres further.”
Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt and is about three times farther from the sun than Earth.
“The discovery indicates that the starting material in the solar system contained the essential elements, or the building blocks, for life,” Russell said.
“Ceres may have been able to take this process only so far. Perhaps to move further along the path took a larger body with more complex structure and dynamics,” like Earth, he said.
The organic material was found near a 50km-wide crater in Ceres’ northern hemisphere.
Although the exact molecular compounds in the organics could not be identified, they matched tar-like minerals, such as kerite or asphaltite, the scientists wrote.
“Because Ceres is a dwarf planet that may still preserve internal heat from its formation period and may even contain a subsurface ocean, this opens the possibility that primitive life could have developed on Ceres itself,” planetary scientist Michael Kuppers of the European Space Astronomy Centre in Madrid wrote in an related essay in Science.
Based on the location and type of organics found on Ceres, scientists ruled out the possibility they were deposited by a crashing asteroid or comet.
Lead researcher Maria Cristina De Sanctis of Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics and colleagues suspect the material formed inside Ceres through hydrothermal activity, though how the organics reached the surface remains a mystery.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not