man, so many planets have subsurface oceans, there must be a lot of species of eyeless space whales across the universe
> whales across the universe
and bowls of petunias
Planet Ceres is an 'ocean world' with sea water beneath surface, mission finds
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Re: Planet Ceres is an 'ocean world' with sea water beneath surface, mission finds
#22> Dwarf planet, believed to be a barren space rock, has an ‘extensive reservoir’ of brine beneath its surface, images show
Believed by who? We already knew it was made substantially of ice. Isn't this just discovering that some of it is liquid?
Wikipedia quotes a PDF from 2017 regarding the quantity of ice, and by then the fact of Ceres having so much ice had already been worked into the story line of The Expanse.
Re: Planet Ceres is an 'ocean world' with sea water beneath surface, mission finds
#23Re: Planet Ceres is an 'ocean world' with sea water beneath surface, mission finds
#24Re: Planet Ceres is an 'ocean world' with sea water beneath surface, mission finds
#25There goes the water rationing narrative in The Expanse...
The book(s) acknowledges it's made of ice. You can't drink your entire habitat.
Re: Planet Ceres is an 'ocean world' with sea water beneath surface, mission finds
#26Ceres is one of the more interesting candidates for life in our solar system. Ceres is in the habitable zone for our solar system (although just barely), it's surface temperature is -30 F (eq. to winter in Greenland), and it's detected that the water on the surface is 20% carbon by mass (though that can mean a lot of things).
I had to stand around waiting for a bus in 0 F for a few years of my life. Did not detect any life around that bus stop.
You didn't look closely enough. You were surrounded by it.
Re: Planet Ceres is an 'ocean world' with sea water beneath surface, mission finds
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
The question is whether there is a source of energy for that subsurface ocean. If it's geologically dead the entire thing could be uniformly quite cold. Unlike some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn it's not headed by gravitational tidal effects.
If that's the case why would it be an ocean at all, rather than a block of ice?
Pressure? Water unlike most materials expands when it freezes.
Re: Planet Ceres is an 'ocean world' with sea water beneath surface, mission finds
#28Re: Planet Ceres is an 'ocean world' with sea water beneath surface, mission finds
#29There goes the water rationing narrative in The Expanse...
The title says "water" but the article says "brine". Don't count on it.
Re: Planet Ceres is an 'ocean world' with sea water beneath surface, mission finds
#30There goes the water rationing narrative in The Expanse...
My recollection was that Mars raided Ceres for ice, prior to or while spinning it up. It would take a hell of a lot of mass drivers, all pointed in the same axis, to spin up a dwarf planet.