Giuseppe Piazzi thought he saw a planet when he spotted Ceres. Astronomers did not know about asteroids at that time. There is an enormous amount of them in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
A third of the mass in the main asteroid belt is accounted for by the dwarf planet Ceres. It dwarfs the other bodies. Even though its neighbours are mostly asteroids, we know that it is a planet.
What is a dwarf planet doing in the asteroid belt?
The answer is that the asteroid belt did not contain Ceres. It migrated to its current position after forming further out in the Solar System. It isn't the first study to reach that conclusion, but it adds more weight to the idea.
The article is called Dynamical Origin of the Dwarf Planet Ceres and it was published in the journal. The author is a physics professor at Sao Paulo State University in Brazil. The co-authors come from the US, France and the university.
Ceres is a dwarf planet, a Protoplanet and sometimes an asteroid. No one should get hung up on it. In 2006 it was classified as a dwarf planet.
There are three dwarf planets in the asteroid belt. The other two are Pallas and Vesta. A fourth large body, called Hygiea, is 434 km in diameter and may be a dwarf planet. Half of the asteroid belt is made up of these four bodies.
The majority of what we know about the dwarf planet comes from NASA. Dawn was the first to visit two extraterrestrial bodies and the first to go around a dwarf planet. Dawn ran out of fuel in October of last year. It is in a stable position around the dwarf planet.
The terminology and descriptions of the largest objects in the asteroid belt can be difficult to understand. There is only one body in the belt that is large enough to maintain a spheroid shape. The exosphere is a short-lived atmosphere. The dwarf planet's gravity is not strong enough to hold onto it. This is important because asteroids don't usually emit vapour.
The presence of ammonia is a clue.
When the Sun is heating them, comets have volatile ices like ammonia. The comet's tail and coma are created by that. The comets come from the outer regions of the Solar System. It's possible that it originated in the colder regions of the Solar System since it's frozen like a comet.
The presence of ammonia ice is strong observational evidence that the Solar System's coldest region may have been formed by the fusion of water and carbon dioxide.
The outer Solar System is colder than the inner Solar System. astrophysicists speak of a single frost line for simplicity, but there are specific frost lines for different volatiles. The frost line is close to Jupiter, but it hasn't always been there. As the Solar System evolved, it moved. The Sun's warmth didn't reach as far as the solar nebula in the early days. The frost line was closer to the Sun because it was less energetic.
The position of the frost line may have been affected by the growth of giant planets. The planets may have moved closer to the Sun as they acquired gas and solid objects, according to the co-author.
In our article, we propose a scenario to explain why Ceres is different from other asteroids. In this scenario, ammonia was abundant and the planet Ceres began to form. Ribeiro de Sousa said that it was pulled into the asteroid belt as a migrant from the outer Solar System and lived for 4.5 billion years.
The idea was tested with a lot of computer simulations. They created giant planets inside the Sun's disk. They also included some planets that were in the embryo stage. They created a group of objects that were similar to Ceres. Their inclusion is based on the assumption that Ceres is one of the Solar System's early planetesimals, objects on their way to becoming planets.
“Our main finding was that in the past there were at least 3,600 Ceres-like objects beyond Saturn’s orbit. With this number of objects, our model showed that one of them could have been transported and captured in the Asteroid Belt, in an orbit very similar to Ceres’s current orbit.”
Rafael Ribeiro de Sousa, lead author, Sao Paulo State University.
The simulations showed that the giant planet formation stage was very turbulent, with huge collisions between the progenitors of Uranus and Neptune, ejection of planets out of the Solar System, and even invasion of the inner region by planets with three times Earth's mass. There were objects similar to Ceres scattered all over the place. Ribeiro de Sousa said that some may have reached the region of the Asteroid Belt and acquired stable orbits capable of surviving other events.
The researchers say there are four steps involved in implanting an object in the asteroid belt. The first is a fast mixing phase in the position of the planetesimals. The second is when the candidate is captured by giant planets. The third step is a chaotic phase, in which the object can encounter other invaders that can increase or decrease its eccentricity, and scatter it into more stable regions in the inner asteroid belt. The chaotic phase also includes gas drag and gaseous friction that can change the candidate's inclination and eccentricity and implant it into its current position. The fourth phase is where the gas is removed from the disk, invaders are removed, and the implantation is stable.
The simulations showed that there were at least 3,600 objects like Ceres in the past. Ribeiro de Sousa said that the model showed that one of the objects could have been captured in the Asteroid Belt.
These aren't the first researchers to come up with a number like that. Others have studied craters and the number of objects in the Kuiper Belt to come up with their results. The study supports our understanding of how the Solar System formed and evolved. The study shows that the most recent models of the formation of the Solar System are accurate.
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