NASA discovers mysterious 'energy source' that could create alien life

According to NASA, the dwarf planet Ceres has a hidden "energy source" that could have created alien life.

New NASA research suggests that Ceres, the closest dwarf planet to Earth, may have once had an ancient “energy source” that could have sparked the evolution of extraterrestrial life forms in the ocean beneath the tiny planet’s surface. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA.

Ceres is the largest body in the main asteroid belt of the Solar System, located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, and is very likely to have once hosted life. The dwarf planet Ceres is about 950 km wide, about a quarter of the diameter of the Moon. Photo: NASA.

Accordingly, Ceres is not large enough to be considered a planet but large enough to be considered a "dwarf planet" like Pluto, which was classified by researchers in 2006. Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

In recent years, scientists have learned a lot about Ceres thanks to NASA's Dawn probe, which visited the dwarf planet from 2014 to 2018. One of the most exciting discoveries from the Dawn mission is that the giant asteroid is likely a water world. Photo: NASA.

Specifically, traces of water and salty minerals on the icy surface of the dwarf planet Ceres suggest the existence of a large reservoir of brine located kilometers below the surface. Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Other NASA studies have also suggested that Ceres's underground ocean may also contain organic carbon, a key component of all life on Earth. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA/PSI.

Until now, scientists thought it was unlikely that life could arise on Ceres because the dwarf planet lacked any energy sources capable of fostering life. But new research published in the journal Science Advances reveals that this may not always be the case. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA.

The team built thermal and chemical models that simulated the temperature and interior composition of Ceres over time. They found that, about 2.5 billion years ago, the dwarf planet's subsurface ocean may have had a steady supply of hot water and dissolved gases that migrated up from metamorphic rocks in the rocky core. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

This heat comes from the decay of radioactive elements in the rocky interior of the dwarf planet Ceres when it was young, a process thought to be common to bodies in the solar system. Therefore, Ceres had a long history of maintaining a chemical energy source sufficient to sustain life. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA.

According to experts, the chances of life existing on Ceres were highest from about half a billion to 2 billion years after the dwarf planet formed, that is 2.5 - 4 billion years ago, when its rocky core reached its peak temperature. During that time, if life existed on Ceres, it would most likely be single-celled organisms similar to early life on Earth. Photo: NASA.

Readers are invited to watch the video : Universe map with more than 900,000 stars, galaxies and black holes. Source: THĐT1.

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