Deep Chasms Could Lead to a Hidden Ocean on Uranus's Moon Ariel
Those shells are a big problem for Earth-based scientists who desperately want to take a peek at those liquid centers, but one moon may be wearing its heart on its sleeve. The surface of Uranus's moon Ariel is scored with deep chasms – and those may contain deposits disgorged from below.
Those include carbon dioxide ice and other carbon-bearing deposits that may have resulted from chemical processes taking place inside the little moon. If this is the case, it means those gorges could be a way to study the interior of this ocean world without having to undertake more dramatic research efforts.
"If we're right, these medial grooves are probably the best candidates for sourcing those carbon oxide deposits and uncovering more details about the moon's interior," says planetary geologist Chloe Beddingfield of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
"No other surface features show evidence of facilitating the movement of materials from inside Ariel, making this finding particularly exciting."
The chasms on the surface of Ariel are fascinating. Some of their floors are scored by parallel grooves which are among the youngest known geological features visible on the moon. It's not clear how they got there, but a lot depends on what the moon has going on beneath its surface.
Previous studies suggested that they may be the result of an interaction between tectonic and volcanic activity, but the specifics have been difficult to pin down. Beddingfield and her colleagues used observation data and formation models to see if they could fill in the gaps.
They were able to show that a process that takes place on Earth could be responsible for the marks we see on Ariel. Known as spreading, that process takes place on volcanic ridges here on Earth, where the seafloor parts and material rises up from below to form a new part of the crust.
On Ariel, spreading could occur when warmer material surges upwards from below, splitting the moon's crust before filling the crack it created. The researchers found that when they joined the two edges of Ariel's chasms as if zipping them back up, the two sides matched perfectly; and the parallel grooves seen at the floors of some of the chasms are consistent with materials being deposited over time.
There are a number of reasons this is interesting. Uranus' moons have, in the past, entered orbital lockstep, in which their orbital periods formed precise ratios known as resonance. Orbital resonance results in a gravitational push-pull that produces internal heating, melting, and refreezing.
Such periods of resonance could be what drove changes on Ariel's surface; but they could also produce hidden oceans by making moons' interiors warm enough to sustain liquid, briny water. Recent observations from the JWST strongly hint that such an ocean is present on Ariel.
If this is the case, the ocean could be responsible for the carbon dioxide ice seen on the moon's surface and in its chasms, but as yet we have too little information to know.
"The size of Ariel's possible ocean and its depth beneath the surface can only be estimated, but it may be too isolated to interact with spreading centers," Beddingfield says.
"There's just a lot we don't know. And while carbon oxide ices are present on Ariel's surface, it's still unclear whether they're associated with the grooves because Voyager 2 didn't have instruments that could map the distribution of ices."
We're well past due to send an exploration mission to Uranus and Neptune. Let's add Ariel's mystery grooves to the list of things to look at when it finally happens.
Chop chop, space agencies!
The research has been published in The Planetary Science Journal.
A Strange New Cosmic Explosion May Have Just Been Discovered
Astronomers Amazed by Perfect 'Einstein Ring' Gleaming in Space
Astronomers Capture Breathtaking Image of Newborn Star Taking Shape
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
San Francisco Chronicle
17 minutes ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Astronomers capture the birth of planets around a baby sun outside our solar system
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Astronomers have discovered the earliest seeds of rocky planets forming in the gas around a baby sun-like star, providing a precious peek into the dawn of our own solar system. It's an unprecedented snapshot of 'time zero,' scientists reported Wednesday, when new worlds begin to gel. 'We've captured a direct glimpse of the hot region where rocky planets like Earth are born around young protostars," said Leiden Observatory's Melissa McClure from the Netherlands, who led the international research team. 'For the first time, we can conclusively say that the first steps of planet formation are happening right now.' The observations offer a unique glimpse into the inner workings of an emerging planetary system, said the University of Chicago's Fred Ciesla, who was not involved in the study appearing in the journal Nature. 'This is one of the things we've been waiting for. Astronomers have been thinking about how planetary systems form for a long period of time," Ciesla said. 'There's a rich opportunity here.' NASA's Webb Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory in Chile teamed up to unveil these early nuggets of planetary formation around the young star known as HOPS-315. It's a yellow dwarf in the making like the sun, yet much younger at 100,000 to 200,000 years old and some 1,370 light-years away. A single light-year is 6 trillion miles. In a cosmic first, McClure and her team stared deep into the gas disk around the baby star and detected solid specks condensing — signs of early planet formation. A gap in the outer part of the disk gave allowed them to gaze inside, thanks to the way the star tilts toward Earth. They detected silicon monoxide gas as well as crystalline silicate minerals, the ingredients for what's believed to be the first solid materials to form in our solar system more than 4.5 billion years ago. The action is unfolding in a location comparable to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter containing the leftover building blocks of our solar system's planets. The condensing of hot minerals was never detected before around other young stars, 'so we didn't know if it was a universal feature of planet formation or a weird feature of our solar system,' McClure said in an email. 'Our study shows that it could be a common process during the earliest stage of planet formation.' While other research has looked at younger gas disks and, more commonly, mature disks with potential planet wannabes, there's been no specific evidence for the start of planet formation until now, McClure said. In a stunning picture taken by the ESO's Alma telescope network, the emerging planetary system resembles a lightning bug glowing against the black void. It's impossible to know how many planets might form around HOPS-315. With a gas disk as massive as the sun's might have been, it could also wind up with eight planets a million or more years from now, according to McClure. Purdue University's Merel van 't Hoff, a co-author, is eager to find more budding planetary systems. By casting a wider net, astronomers can look for similarities and determine which processes might be crucial to forming Earth-like worlds. ___ AP video journalist Javier Arciga contributed to this report. ___ The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Gizmodo
17 minutes ago
- Gizmodo
Wild New Image Shows a Twin of Our Solar System Being Born
The first-ever baby pictures of a solar system that's not our own are finally here—and they're beautiful—and as adorable as space entities can get. In a paper published today in Nature, astronomers presented HOPS-315: a Sun-like protostar cooking up a brew of hot minerals and silicon monoxide gas, located about 1,300 light-years away from Earth. The special thing about HOPS-315 is that the baby star and its surrounding environment bear a striking resemblance to an earlier version of our own solar system, making it the quintessential candidate for astronomers hoping to better understand how our Solar System came to be. For study lead author Melissa McClure, the most intriguing aspect of HOPS-315 is its protoplanetary disk, or the stormy region around a newborn star where planets are born, she told Gizmodo in a video call. Astronomers have already observed protoplanetary disks by the hundreds, some of which even have (gassy) planets. But none have been as young, robust, and filled with planet-forming compounds as the one encircling HOPS-315, McClure, an astronomer at Leiden University in the Netherlands, told Gizmodo in a video call. McClure and her team analyzed data on nearly 3,000 protostars gathered by the now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope. Most of them were too old—'like, at least a million years, maybe five million years old'—and only had enormous gas giants floating in their vicinity, she said. On the other hand, stars that did fit the 'age requirement,' so to speak, were enveloped by a thick, cold molecular cloud concealing their stormy insides from view. Of the thousands of stars they sifted through, HOPS-315—about 100,000 years old—happened to be positioned at an angle that allowed the team to get a rare peek past the thick, gassy barrier. Using a combination of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), they singled out what McClure described as 'wiggly, hairy-looking' signatures of chemical compounds strongly correlated with early planet formation. One of those, silicon monoxide, according to McClure, was a 'clear smoking gun for interstellar grains' that evolve to become planets, so she knew they'd struck on something meaningful. 'And we also saw these hot minerals in the same part from JWST, so we could put these two things together and say we're clearly seeing this 't=0' moment for the first time,' McClure said. 'HOPS-315 is very similar, in terms of mass, size, and the age we're seeing it at, to what the Sun would have looked like [earlier on]. Because of that, it's like an analog to the Sun—that's why we're saying we're seeing another solar system being formed.' Looking ahead, McClure's team plans to conduct a deeper dive into these signals, some of which didn't quite match what theoretical models would have predicted for similar situations, she noted. In particular, HOPS-315 offers an extremely rare opportunity to study planetesimals—hard fragments of loose cosmic mass that eventually bunch up to form the more solid parts of a planet. Because they're so ephemeral and just generally very tiny, the only way astronomers could study planetesimals was by indirectly tracking their formation through meteorite samples—until now, that is. Webb Telescope Spots a Small Asteroid From 62 Million Miles Away 'We're actually seeing right now that these planetesimals are actively forming,' McClure said. 'And we're absolutely going to follow that up—and this would be a cool new way to access [our galaxy's origins] that you can't do in any other way.' A fair number of recent discoveries in astronomy have come from revisiting previously observed objects using newer, more advanced instruments. In this case, astronomers used JWST and ALMA to supplement pre-existing Spitzer data. A similar example is Herbig-Haro 49/50, or the 'Cosmic Tornado.' Astronomers initially observed this steaming pillar of space dust—the product of fierce plasma jets from protostars—with Spitzer in 2006. Almost 20 years later, JWST captured the same object but in much finer resolution, revealing details that weren't so clear back then. This, in part, is evidently thanks to the continuous advances in observational technology. But it's also the product of the grueling tenacity of astrophysicists who refuse to forget about the pressing mysteries surrounding the universe, no matter how dated they may be. So, HOPS-315, as with many discoveries in astrophysics, is a testament to just how long certain findings can take—the reason why, perhaps, the answers we finally arrive at feel ever more rewarding, illuminating, and, of course, beautiful!
UPI
18 minutes ago
- UPI
Researchers observe early state of planet formation beyond Earth's sun
European astronomers for the first time observed the start of a new solar system. Photo by John Angelillo/UPI | License Photo July 15 (UPI) -- A group of international researchers said Wednesday they witnessed some of the earliest stages of a planet beyond the Earth's sun beginning to form. The researchers from the United States, Canada and Europe saw the hot space minerals just as they began to solidify, marking the earliest stage in the planet-forming process that researchers have witnessed. "For the first time, we have identified the earliest moment when planet formation is initiated around a star other than our sun," professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands, Melissa McClure said. The process was witnessed around the baby star HOPS-315, an analog for the budding sun, that is 1,300 light years away from Earth. Researchers had previously witnessed young discs of gas and dust called "protoplanetary discs" that were the birthplace for newly formed Jupiter-like planets but the latest showed an earlier stage that scientists had never observed before. "We've always known that the first solid parts of planets, or 'planetesimals,' must form further back in time, at earlier stages," McClure said. Researchers first identified the minerals using the James Webb Telescope and then observed the system with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, to determine where the signals were coming from. The findings showed that silicon monoxide, or SiO, which has the potential to condense in the high temperatures found in young planetary discs, can be found when baby stars are in their gaseous state, meaning it was just beginning to solidify. "This process has never been seen before in a protoplanetary disc or anywhere outside our Solar System," Professor at the University of Michigan, Edwin Bergin said. Andrew Sookdeo contributed to this report.
