NASA is looking for ice volcanoes on the dwarf planet Ceres

For scientists, the summit, about 13,000 feet high, corresponds to the bill: it was their first discovery of a water volcano on the dwarf planet. They named it Ahuna Mons and estimated its age at 200 million years – old enough to have stopped bursting, but young enough to suggest that it was active in the recent past.

It was an exciting discovery for scientists, who turned to a new question about ice volcanoes on Ceres: why was there only one?

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Michael Sori, a scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, suspected that other ice volcanoes had existed on Ceres, but were erased by a natural process over time. In this process, known as sluggish relaxation – which looks more like a new skin care routine than a geological phenomenon – a drop of material can collapse under its own weight and ooze on the outside. "The rocks do not do it at normal temperatures and timescales, but the ice does," Sori said in a recent press release. Erupting ice eventually flattens the surrounding terrain. Meteorite impacts also help by breaking peaks.

To test this theory, Sori and his colleagues used computer models to simulate the Ceres landscape over hundreds of millions of years. They inserted ice volcanoes into the field and moved the clock forward. The poles of volcanoes and the dwarf planet, where it is colder, have remained frozen. Near the equator, where it is warmer, the volcanoes seemed to deflate, becoming shorter and more rounded until they flattened out.

To reinforce their hypothesis, the researchers needed real data and they turned to Dawn, the The NASA spatialship. Sori and his team used topographic observations of the probe to look for bumps on the ground corresponding to their models. They found 22 mountains, including Ahuna Mons, that fit perfectly with the predictions of their simulations. They estimate that the reliefs are hundreds of millions of years old and that Ceres produces a new ice volcano about one every 50 million years.

Their results were published earlier this week in Astronomy of nature.

The mechanism that feeds these cryovolcanoes on Ceres remains a mystery. Scientists believe that the dwarf planet could have enough primordial heat from its formation, billions of years ago, to produce materials beneath its surface.

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Hanna Sizemore, scientist at the Planetary Science Institute and co-author of a study, says that evidence of the presence of cryovolcans on Ceres and other ice-bearing bodies in the solar system accumulate. Scientists have already observed ice volcanoes on the Moon of Jupiter, Europa, Saturn satellites Enceladus and Titan, the moon of Neptune Triton and even Pluto. In the case of Europa and Encelade, the observations suggest that the moons harbor massive oceans beneath their icy exteriors, capable of supporting microbial life.

"It's really about whether there are really volcanoes on icy planets, if ice, salt, and dirt can really act together like molten rock on the Earth, Mars, the moon, and Venus," said Sizemore. "There is still uncertainty about the similarity of what is happening with volcanism [on Earth], although I think the case is growing, there are really cryovolcanoes.