Relict Ocean Worlds: Ceres
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Relict Ocean Worlds: Ceres Maria Cristina De Sanctis1 · Giuseppe Mitri2,3 · Julie Castillo-Rogez4 · Christopher H. House5 · Simome Marchi6 · Carol A. Raymond4 · Yasuhito Sekine7,8
Received: 17 May 2019 / Accepted: 27 April 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract The aim of this chapter is to describe available evidence for the existence of relict ocean worlds. The focus is on Ceres as a clear example of such a world as indicated by the results from the Dawn mission. The sections of this chapter will also reflect the differences and commonalities with other recognized ocean worlds. We focus on Ceres as an example of relict ocean world and the implications it holds for the broader solar system. The presence of a large amount of water in the outer Solar System, the presence of low eutectic salts, and the similar pressure and temperature regimes at depth in icy moons and other dwarf planets suggest that many of these large icy worlds harbor or harbored deep oceans. Ceres is an example of relict Ocean world. Keywords Ceres · Exocean worlds · Astrobiology · asteroids, icy satellites · dwarf planets
1 Introduction We focus on Ceres as an example of relict ocean world and the implications it holds for the broader solar system. There may be many more ocean worlds in the primordial solar Ocean Worlds Edited by Athena Coustenis, Tilman Spohn, Rafael Rodrigo, Kevin P. Hand, Alexander Hayes, Karen Olsson-Francis, Frank Postberg, Christophe Sotin, Gabriel Tobie, Francois Raulin and Nicolas Walter
B M.C. De Sanctis 1
Istituto di Astrofisica and Planetologia Spaziali, INAF, Roma, Italy
2
International Research School of Planetary Sciences, Università d’Annunzio, Pescara, Italy
3
Dipartimento di Ingegneria e Geologia, Università d’Annunzio, Pescara, Italy
4
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA
5
The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA
6
Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, CO 80302, USA
7
Earth-Life Science Institute, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan
8
Institute of Nature and Environmental Technology, Kanazawa University, Kanazawa, Japan
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Fig. 1 Europa, Enceladus, Pluto and Ceres not to scale (credits: NASA)
system, but Ceres is the only one that has been deeply characterized with an exceptional level of detail. Thus, findings at Ceres can be applied to our understanding of the population of relict ocean worlds at large. Historically, Ceres has always been considered outstanding against main belt asteroids because of its much greater size, its nearly unique reflectance spectrum, and the lack of an asteroidal family. The dwarf planet Ceres comprises nearly one third of the mass of the asteroid belt, with a mean radius of 470 km and bulk density of 2162 kg m−3 (Russell et al. 2016). It shares similarities with icy moons of the outer solar system. Radius and density are intermediate between those of Europa (1560 km and 3014 kg m−3 ) and Enceladus (252 km and 1611 kg m−3 ), and comparable to thos
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