The asteroid Ceres was no water, a discovery made in Italy – The Messenger

Those mysterious points of light on the surface of the asteroid Ceres may have found an answer.
“The minerals that we have identified in the bright central region of Occator crater must necessarily have been formed by the interaction with water. The presence of carbonates reinforces the idea that Ceres had internal hydrothermal activity, which pushed these materials up to the surface. “
So on the surface of that distant asteroid once had liquid water.
Few words to a huge discovery.
And this time the Italian researchers have distinguished themselves.

tHE ITALIAN TEAM
Maria Cristina De Sanctis INAF is radiant, it was precisely her, the coordinator of a team of researchers, to announce the discovery obtained thanks to the Italian spectrometer observations VIR located aboard NASA’s Dawn probe, one Italian Space agency instrument.

According to the study , the brightest area of ​​the dwarf planet, located within the Occator crater, which has long been shrouded in dark mystery, has the highest concentration of carbonates ever recorded in environments outside of the Earth. “The type and abundance of these minerals -has yet said De Sanctis- suggests that there has been the presence of liquid water below the surface of the planetoid in recent geological time.”

BUT WHERE FIND CERERE

 The asteroid has an orbit between Mars and Jupiter and is in that band called main belt asteroid. Its motion of revolution around the Sun lasts more than 4 and a half years and is located at an average distance from Earth of nearly 5 billion kilometers. deposits of ice, salt or volcanic activity? The mystery of the white dots of Ceres, a dwarf planet, until now remained had not yet been revealed, but the high-resolution image developed by NASA about a year ago and taken from about 1,470 kilometers, had provided very interesting details. But even with such a careful definition scientists hannio not been able to give an explanation on the possible nature of these structures.

THE MISSION DAWN

 The probe NASA had started in September 2007 from Cape Canaveral, in addition to the exploration area of ​​delal Cererere has thoroughly studied the asteroid Vesta, around which remained for 14 months between 2011 and 2012. Returning to the discovery of De Sanctis team, which will be published in Nature, it must be said Cheil team found that the material analyzed in the crater is sodium carbonate, “a salt that on Earth-we read in dell’Inaf- document is typical of hydrothermal environments. This material would be leaked from inside of Ceres, because it may not have been deposited by the impact of an asteroid. Therefore the ascent of this material from the deeper layers of the celestial body suggests that temperatures in Ceres are higher than previously thought so far. It could conceivably have been an impact with the asteroid that formed the crater Occator to favor exposure to the surface carbonate observed today, but the researchers think a role in this emergence they have also had internal processes to Ceres same. “

WAS dISCOVERED BY AN ITALIAN IN 1801

 To discover Ceres was the Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi, exactly 1 January 1801. “I had announced this star as a comet -scriveva Piazzi in her diary more than 200 years ago- but since it is not accompanied by any nebulosity, and also its movement is so slow and rather uniform, came to my mind several times that it might be something better than a comet. “

enzo.vitale@ilmessaggero.it