Ceres is a dwarf planet rising in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. It was originally considered a planet, but was later reduced to an asteroid by scientists.
How Jupiter pushed the dwarf planet Ceres into the asteroid belt
Jupiter’s gravity was responsible for pushing Ceres into the asteroid belt between the largest planet in the solar system and the red planet, according to a new computer simulation.
asteroid Ceres
Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt, its width is about 1,000 kilometers and therefore stands out among the neighboring space rocks with a diameter of only tens or hundreds of meters. In addition, the dwarf planet contains chemical compounds in it that are not typical for its “neighbors” in the asteroid belt, such as Ammonia, for example.
These and many other strange features of Ceres have led scientists to believe it was an alien in the asteroid belt, and thanks to the new data, they may now know how the “parasitism” occurred.
Why is Ceres different from asteroids?
“In our article, we propose a scenario to explain why Ceres is so different from neighboring asteroids,” said Rafael Ribeiro de Sousa, professor of physics at Sao Paulo State University in Brazil. During the giant planet’s growth phase, they were pulled into the asteroid belt as migrants from the outer solar system and have survived for 4.5 billion years now.”
According to the new results, there were “at least 3,600 Ceres-like objects outside Saturn’s orbit,” and Ribeiro de Sousa suggested that “with this number of objects, our model showed that one of them could be transported and captured in the asteroid belt, in an orbit very similar to the current Ceres orbit.” “.
With Ceres containing ammonia, a compound that has not been observed in ordinary space rocks but is present in comets, it prompted scientists to wonder how it would reach the asteroid belt if it had a comet origin, and the answer to this may be related to the gas giants, that is, Jupiter, In the case of Ceres.
Since the solar system was forming more than 4.5 billion years ago, the gravitational pull of the gas giants was such a powerful force that scattered many Ceres-like objects all over the place.
How did the giant planet form?
Ribeiro de Sousa explained: “Our simulations showed that the giant planet formation phase was very turbulent, with massive collisions between the precursors of Uranus and Neptune, the ejection of planets from the solar system, and even the invasion of the inner region by planets with masses greater than three times the mass of Earth, and in addition In addition, the strong gravitational perturbation caused objects similar to Ceres to scatter all over the place, some of which may have reached the asteroid belt region and acquired stable orbits capable of surviving other events.”
As a result of these events, scientists now believe, that Ceres found itself lying in the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars, and was joined by another pair of dwarf planets, Vesta and Blass, and there is another space body in the asteroid belt, called Hygia, which may also be a protoplanet.
Source: Sputnik International