Deposits Found on a Nearby Asteroid Point to Salty Water in the Outer Solar System
Scientists have uncovered salt minerals in samples from asteroid Ryugu, pointing to a past with liquid water. The presence of these salts suggests that Ryugu’s parent body once hosted a warm, saline environment before the water vanished. This discovery could help us understand the role of water in shaping planets and moons across the Solar System.
Ryugu’s Salty Secret: What Scientists Found
Asteroids that pass near Earth often spark concern about potential collisions, no matter how unlikely. However, their proximity also presents valuable opportunities to study the universe. One such asteroid, Ryugu, measuring about 900 meters across and part of the Apollo group, has recently provided new insights into the search for life’s building blocks beyond Earth.
Researchers from Kyoto University have discovered salt minerals in samples collected from Ryugu during Japan’s Hayabusa2 mission. These deposits, which include sodium carbonate, halite, and sodium sulfates, suggest that liquid saltwater once existed within Ryugu’s parent body.
Preserving Clues from Space
Before analyzing the samples, scientists suspected that Ryugu might contain compounds not typically found in meteorites. They anticipated the presence of highly water-soluble materials that would react quickly with Earth’s moisture, making them difficult to detect unless studied in their original, space-preserved state.
“Careful handling allowed us to identify the delicate salt minerals, providing a unique glimpse into Ryugu’s chemical history,” says corresponding researcher Toru Matsumoto.
Ryugu’s Past: A Watery Beginning?
Experts believe the asteroid was once part of a larger parent body that existed about 4.5 billion years ago, shortly after the formation of the solar system. This parent body would have been heated by radioactive decay, creating an environment of hot water below 100°C. While Ryugu and its grains did not contain any moisture, questions remain about how the liquid water was lost.
The Vanishing Act: How Did Water Disappear?
“These crystals tell us how liquid water disappeared from Ryugu’s parent body,” says Matsumoto. The salt crystals dissolve easily in water, suggesting that they could only have precipitated within highly saline water and in conditions with a limited amount of liquid.
“We hypothesized that as fractures exposed the saltwater to space or as the parent body cooled, this liquid could have either evaporated or frozen,” Matsumoto explains. “The salt minerals we’ve found are the crystallized remnants of that water.”
Comparing Ryugu to Other Icy Worlds
The deposits could prove crucial in comparing the evolved water in the dwarf planet Ceres – located in the Asteroid Belt – and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, since researchers believe these icy bodies harbor subsurface oceans or liquid reservoirs. They expect sodium carbonates and halite will be found in surface deposits on Ceres, in water plumes from Saturn’s satellite Enceladus, and on the surfaces of Jupiter’s satellites Europa and Ganymede.
A New Key to Planetary Evolution
Since salt production is closely linked to the geological settings and brine chemistry in these aqueous bodies, the discovery of sodium salts in the Ryugu samples provide new insights for comparing the role that water has played in the development of planets and moons in the outer Solar System.
Reference: “Sodium carbonates on Ryugu as evidence of highly saline water in the outer Solar System” by Toru Matsumoto, Takaaki Noguchi, Akira Miyake, Yohei Igami, Megumi Matsumoto, Toru Yada, Masayuki Uesugi, Masahiro Yasutake, Kentaro Uesugi, Akihisa Takeuchi, Hayato Yuzawa, Takuji Ohigashi and Tohru Araki, 18 November 2024, Nature Astronomy.
DOI: 10.1038/s41550-024-02418-1
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2 Comments
Just throwing this one out there…(pun intended), but maybe planet earth is the parent body – from some blast in the past.
The fact that scientists find water in asteroids may be interesting. In the case of the Ryugu asteroid, the Japanese scientist correctly guessed that it had broken away from a parent or a larger planet. I said earlier that many planets have come to the Sun from the great arms of the Milky Way. The presence of water or ice in asteroids is very interesting and strange for scientists. This phenomenon of water is mostly found in planets at the edge of the galaxy. But finding a planet like Earth in the entire Milky Way galaxy, etc., is 100% alien. This is my opinion about the reason for the existence of water in the solar system, which is located at the edge of the galaxy. I will give you a simple example. Consider a cylindrical metal tank, similar to the tanks that store crude oil. And from the bottom of the tank to the top of the ten-meter tank, pipes are placed in the tank at a distance of one meter each, so that the petroleum materials, i.e. refined oil, are separated. When the crude oil is heated in the tank, the heavy materials are placed in the first pipe from the bottom of the tank, which is bitumen, and in order up to the top of the tank, they are placed in the tenth gas pipe, and diesel and oil are placed in the middle pipe of the tank. In a very large nebula, like a tank full of crude oil, in the middle of the nebula hard metals with high mass and density are placed. And in order to the edge of the nebula, the large cloud that a galaxy is trying to form, water and oxygen are placed in the form of gas at the edge of the galaxy where the solar system is now in the Milky Way galaxy. It is natural that it is in the arms of the Milky Way galaxy, whose planets and stars are located in the arm and edge of the galaxy. In star systems, next to the stars of this arm, there are planets that have water and oxygen. The earth that has so much water and oxygen is due to the arrival of planets that hit the sun through the milky way and after hitting the sun and disintegrating the water and oxygen of the said planets reached the earth through fragments carrying water and oxygen. I know that in a planet that is next to a star in billions of stars in the galaxy, with all the conditions that the earth exists in the solar system next to the sun with a suitable disk like the planet earth with a star, the same solar system, there is a possibility of water and oxygen. In the Milky Way planets, the large arms of the galaxy, which were located at the outermost edge of the galaxy, are from the very small star systems, the planets that had little water. When the Milky Way galaxy passed through this arm of the solar bodies and the solar system, the planets of this large arm of the galaxy collided with the sun like a piece of the mother planet of the galaxy, and a piece of the Ryogo planet collided with a sun planet. which had a little water and various salts in the water and… when the mentioned planet approached the sun, the water of that planet evaporated and the remaining salt belonged to the same mother planet. which remains in the asteroid Ryogo