Gushing water vapour raises question about life on Ceres
25 Jan 2014 4:42 AM IST
Using the European Space Agency’s Herschel infrared space telescope, researchers spotted plumes of water vapour periodically spewing from Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt residing between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
The discovery comes just over a year before the scheduled arrival of NASA’s Dawn spacecraft for a closer look at Ceres, a round body measuring about 590 miles in diameter - less than a third of the size of the moon.
‘This is the first time water vapour has been unequivocally detected on Ceres or any other object in the asteroid belt and provides proof that Ceres has an icy surface and an atmosphere,’ Michael Küppers of the European Space Agency in Spain, who led the research published in the journal Nature, said in a statement.
The question is what is causing these plumes of water vapour from two locations on Ceres. One idea, according to scientists, is that the sun sometimes warms parts of the icy surface enough that water vapour emerges.
Another possibility, they say, is that there is liquid water under the frozen surface of Ceres and that vapour is shooting out of geysers or icy volcanoes.
Dramatic geysers have been spotted on Enceladus, one of the innermost moons of the giant ringed planet Saturn.
The discovery comes just over a year before the scheduled arrival of NASA’s Dawn spacecraft for a closer look at Ceres, a round body measuring about 590 miles in diameter - less than a third of the size of the moon.
‘This is the first time water vapour has been unequivocally detected on Ceres or any other object in the asteroid belt and provides proof that Ceres has an icy surface and an atmosphere,’ Michael Küppers of the European Space Agency in Spain, who led the research published in the journal Nature, said in a statement.
The question is what is causing these plumes of water vapour from two locations on Ceres. One idea, according to scientists, is that the sun sometimes warms parts of the icy surface enough that water vapour emerges.
Another possibility, they say, is that there is liquid water under the frozen surface of Ceres and that vapour is shooting out of geysers or icy volcanoes.
Dramatic geysers have been spotted on Enceladus, one of the innermost moons of the giant ringed planet Saturn.
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