Ceres has turned out to be an interesting challenge for planetary scientists . The dwarf planet has been studied for almost two years byNASA ’s Dawnspacecraft , and while we have found some answers , we have also find many question .
Among them , there ’s the curious case of Ahuna Mons , Ceres ’ deoxyephedrine volcano . You see , it ’s not just one of several ice or cryovolcanoes on Ceres – it ’s the only one . But a new paper published inGeophysical Research Lettersis set to challenge that .
“ opine if there was just one volcano on all of Earth . That would be pose , ” manoeuver out lead author Michael Sori , of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona , in astatement . “ We think we have a very good case that there have been lots of cryovolcanoes on Ceres but they have deformed . ”
The squad surmise that once these frappe volcanoes had formed , they would start “ melting ” back into the planet . This does n’t happen on Earth because our volcanoes are made of rock , but the one on Ceres contains ice , which crap it possible . This phenomenon is call viscous repose and would cause the solid methamphetamine hydrochloride to flatten out over hundreds of million of year .
To test this surmisal , the researchers looked at how long it would take Ahuna Mons to deform . Ahuna Mons is 4 kilometers ( 2.5 miles ) tall , and with Ceres ' diam being just 950 kilometers ( 590 miles ) , it is really an imposingly grandiloquent feature article .
The researcher go different simulation depending on the different potential composition of Ahuna Mons , from 100 percent made of water ice to just about 40 pct . The estimated pace for the ice volcano to be flatten out is between 10 to 50 beat ( 30 to 160 feet ) per million years .
“ Ahuna Mons is at most 200 million years old . It just has n’t had time to deform , ” Sori said .
The airfoil of the dwarf major planet could still be hiding the leftovers of several of these bygone cryovolcanos . And they might be able to be project in the Dawn data .
“ It would be fun to check some of the other feature that are potentially older bean on Ceres to see if they meet in with the possibility of how the shapes should viscously acquire over time , ” Kelsi Singer , a Southwest Research Institute who study immobilize who was not involved with this research , stated . “ Because all of the putative cryovolcanic features on other Earth are different , I call up this helps to thrive our inventory of what is potential . ”
Ceres is located between Mars and Jupiter in the Asteroid Belt . It ’s the only dwarf planet in the inner Solar System and the close world to the Sun to have ice volcanoes , so it might behave differently to what astronomers have observed elsewhere .
