Ceres was perhaps habitable for only half a minute years

The dwarf Ceres planet looks cold and dead, but about a billion years after his training, he may have had a hot interior that made him habitable.

Sam Courville of Arizona State University says that he cannot speculate on the question of whether life occurred on Ceres – but if that had happened, the environment passed from the dwarf planet may have allowed life to survive.

Previous research has indicated that there could be water ice and organic molecules on ceres, pointing towards the possibility of life. But in this study, researchers focused on what these extraterrestrial life forms would have eaten. They considered microbes as those who live in hydrothermal vents in the oceans of the earth and extract energy directly from chemical molecules, rather than consuming other organisms. Could similar microbes have been able to survive in the oceans of the ancient ceres?

The team modeled the past of Ceres on a computer, noting that when it was between half a billion and 2 billion years, pores close to its hot core could have released fluids which then mixed with colder water in its oceans. This process could have provided the chemical “foods” that microbes would have needed.

If we want to find evidence of past or current life in our solar system, explains Amanda Hendrix to the Planetary Science Institute, we must turn to worlds like Ceres which have – or once – oceans.

Surprisingly, the type of microbial survival that the team identified could also have occurred on other frozen objects the size of a ceres. This can mean more planets than expected could be habitable at some point in their evolution.

“If Ceres was habitable in the past, then there are probably dozens of asteroids and moons that were also habitable in the past. And if you can keep them hot, maybe [they are] Always habitable today, ”explains Joe O’Rourke, member of the team, also on Arizona State University.

Habitability could therefore be “a natural consequence of the implementation of good ingredients, which seem to be the current ingredients of the solar system”, explains Courville.

But many details remain to be calculated, even just for Ceres. The researchers say that their model would benefit from a precise chemical analysis of minerals on the surface of the planet, some of which may have been mentioned by underground flows. But no space vessel that could recover them has ever landed on Ceres.