Habemus cryovolcano on Ceres. This is believed by a team of scientists from NASA, from the Goddard space flight center, who have published that the Ahuna Mons mountain of Ceres is a cryovolcano, that is, a volcano of ice and water. This discovery joins other secrets that come to light in six different studies published by the journal Science.
The dwarf planet Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt located between Mars and Jupiter and the Dawn probe was sent to collect information about it. The first data indicate that this world of rock and ice has craters, cracked terrain and other types of traces of geological processes, including cryovolcanoes, very rare in the solar system.
In cryovolcanoes, liquid water would be like the magician or lava of terrestrial volcanoes and the ice would make up the rock. With the images from the Dawn probe, scientists have located a cryovolcanic formation on Ceres called Ahuna Mons, a dome-shaped mountain with an elliptical base and a concave upper zone.
Thanks to a series of mathematical models, the experts, led by researcher Ottaviano Ruesch, have determined that this cryovolcano – 4 kilometers high – formed after the craters that surround it , so that its life is relatively recent.
Chlorine salts could be found next to the water ice under the surface of Ceres and be responsible for the chemical activity that raised Ahuna Mons on the surface creating this ice volcano.
Other investigations have revealed exposed ice water over an area of less than one square kilometer, rapid gusts of solar wind interacting with the dwarf planet, the presence of clay phyllosilicate minerals with magnesium and ammonium uniformly over the entire surface of Ceres or that Its outer layer is not made exclusively of ice or rock , but of a mixture of both.
