What if the famous asteroid was a planetary debris? A new investigation realized that this star body does not have a core, which raises new questions.
Vesta is the second largest asteroid in the solar system. For a long time, the scientific community believed that Vesta had a crust, a cloak and a nucleus-characteristics similar to that of the earth, which made astronomers believe that it could be a proto-planet.
Published in the magazine Nature Astronomyreveals that the internal structure of Vesta is more uniform What was thought – after all, It has no core, They completed the measurements made to their rotation and gravitational field.
“The lack of a core was very surprising,” MSU’s assistant and environmental science and environment professor Seth Jacobson, co -author of the article. “It’s a very different way of thinking about Vesta.”
This discovery reveals new hypotheses days: either Vesta began the process of fusion necessary to give the asteroid different layers, such as a core, cloak and crust, but never ended it, or, as Jacobson had already proposed,Vesta is a broken piece of a growing planet in our solar system.
“This idea went from a somewhat foolish suggestion to a hypothesis that we are now taking seriously due to this reanalysis of NASA’s Dawn Mission data,” says the author.
To prove this theory, it will now be necessary to conduct more research and advance with new approaches to the Dawn Mission data. It will still be necessary to adjust the way they study the Vesta meteorites to deepen any of the hypotheses.
“The collection of meteorites of Vesta It is no longer a sample of a body In the space that could not be a planet, ”says Jacobson.“ These can be pieces of an old planet before it has grown to its fullness. But we still don’t know what planet is this. ”
