Nasa reveals findings from journey to mysterious world at the edge of solar system:
Nasa has revealed its observations from a trip to Ceres[*], the mysterious world hovering at the edge of our solar system.
Ceres is a dwarf planet, and the largest of the huge number of objects that are found in the asteroid belt at the far reaches of our planetary neighbourhood.
Now scientists using data from Nasa observations of the world have revealed a host of new information about that distant dwarf planet.
[...] "Long believed to be a primitive body, Ceres is now an ocean world with deep brines at a regional and potentially global scale," wrote Nasa's Julie Castillo-Rogez, a planetary scientist who did not work on the study. She urged more research and a follow-up mission that could study the evolution of the planet – and its "potential habitability".
[...] The research shows that Ceres is an ocean world, and that it may have been geologically active in the recent past.
And it also adds yet more wonder to the planet, suggesting that the various glowing parts of the surface were formed from different sources.
The findings are discussed in seven new papers published in Nature journals, offering a variety of new information about the dwarf planet.
[*] From the Ceres entry on Wikipedia:
Ceres (/ˈsɪəriːz/;[16] minor-planet designation: 1 Ceres) is the largest object in the main asteroid belt that lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. With a diameter of 940 km (580 mi), Ceres is both the largest of the asteroids and the only dwarf planet inside Neptune's orbit. It is the 25th-largest body in the Solar System within the orbit of Neptune.
Journal References:
(Score: 4, Interesting) by zocalo on Tuesday August 11 2020, @03:43PM (3 children)
None of which changes the fact that the original statement is completely and utterly wrong, of course.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Tuesday August 11 2020, @04:10PM (2 children)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Tuesday August 11 2020, @07:33PM (1 child)
The Heliopause is at least a fairly absolute line, at least in terms of stellar distances. It might not be a perfect sphere (far from it, in fact), but it is something that is exclusively our solar system on one side, and everything else on the other. The boundaries might resemble a bunch of soap bubbles, each slightly deformed from those adjacent, but at least each star would have it's own exclusive zone, as defined by the area where the stellar wind moves directly away from the star, but once it changes direction you're either in the true interstellar space or have just crossed over into the area of influence of a close-neighbour star.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday August 12 2020, @12:43AM
In this context a boundary is a surface not a line.
As France and Spain argue over Andorra. Not an island, though.
The islands between China and Japan are much more likely to end in battles.
-- hendrik