Ceres is a dwarf planet located on the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
The dwarf planet Ceres looks cold and dead, but about a billion of years after its formation, it may have had a warm interior that made it habitable. This indicates that the solar system may be more habitable than we thought.
A study this Wednesday in Science Advances revealed that, with about a thousand million years of evolution, the planet is cold dwarf May have had adequate conditions to support life.
Previous investigations already asked that there could be water of water and organic molecules in Ceres, pointing to the possibility of life. In this study, researchers sought to know what these alien life forms would have eaten.
Under suspicion are microbes, like those living in hydrothermal sources in the oceans of the Earthwhich extract energy directly from chemical molecules; instead of the consumption of other organisms.
As it details, the team modeled Ceres’s past on a computer, finding that when it was between 500 million and 2000 million years old, the Pors near its hot core could have released fluids that later mingled with the colder water of their oceans.
This process could have provided the chemical “food” that the microbes would have needed.
“If we want to find past or current proofs in our solar system we have to look at worlds like Ceres they have – or have had – oceans,” he told New Scientist, Amanda Hendrix do Planetary Science Institutewhich was not part of the investigation.
Surprisingly, the type of microbial life support that the team has identified may also have occurred in other cold objects in the dimension of Ceres. According to experts, this may mean that more planets than we expected can be habitable at some point in their evolution.
“If Ceres has been habitable in the past, then there are probably dozens of asteroids and moons that were also habitable in the past. And if we can keep them hot, perhaps even today they are habitable,” said the member of the investigation team today, said, in turn, Joe O’Rourke.
