A NEARBY dwarf planet may contain brines that could one day make it habitable for life, according to a new study.
The study titled Porosity-filling Metamorphic Brines Explain Ceres’s Low Mantle Density was recently published in The Planetary Science Journal.
The research is led by a team of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists and is primarily focused on the only dwarf planet in our solar system, Ceres.
The team suggests in the study that shortly after Ceres was formed about 4.5 billion years ago, its internal “mildly-warm” temperature caused its mantel to releases fluids “as a consequence of low-grade thermal metamorphism.”
In addition to the fluids, the researchers believe that rock particles, brines, and organic matter were also released – a mixture known as “metamorphic fluids.”
The team of scientists posits that these metamorphic reactions led to a “dehydration and devolatilization of minerals,” causing water-filled holes, or pores in the surrounding rock.
If their findings are indeed correct, then the salt mixture may have caused changes to Ceres’ surface to make it potentially habitable for alien life.
The study authors tested their hypothesis using a model that illustrates what might have happened to the rocks and ices that comprise Ceres as the planet has warmed up and cooled.
Their findings showed that specific rocks in the mantle (i.e serpentine and carbonates) “would partially destabilize and release their volatiles as temperatures in the mantle reach their maximum about 3 Gyr after Ceres’s formation.”
In other words, as the rocks heated, they experienced changes in their chemistry that allowed them to release aqueous fluids and salts.
“The overall composition of the brines appears to be quite similar to the composition of soda lakes in the East African Rift Valley in Kenya,” Jet Propulsion Laboratory geophysicist and the study’s co-author Mohit Daswani told Inverse.
“In the East African Rift Valley, evaporation concentrates the salts, and microbial communities produce the methane biologically. On the other hand, in Ceres, the fluid composition is a result of heating and devolatilizing the rocks of the mantle over time,” he added.
The study noted that based on previous observations from NASA’s Dawn mission, brines are likely present in at least two places below Ceres’s crust: Hanami Planumand and Ahuna Mons.
This would have happened due to aqueous carbon dioxide and other gases produced by metamorphism driving buoyancy and upwelling.
“It is likely too cold for liquid brines to be stable directly beneath these surface features, but the brines that led to the surface deposits may be present below, in the mantle,” Daswani tells Inverse.
The article concluded that future efforts should be made to “study the interaction of metamorphic fluids” to further assess habitable conditions.
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