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WASHINGTON: New observations of some of Neptune’s moons and rings are providing evidence of a catastrophe that occurred billions of years ago around the solar system’s outermost planet in which a Pluto-sized interloper caused a celestial demolition derby.
Researchers used Nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope to examine the composition of three of Neptune’s small inner moons Proteus, Larissa and Galatea and its inner dusty rings, and detected clay minerals that one might expect to find deep inside certain worlds in the outer reaches of the solar system. These magnesium-rich minerals are known to exist on the dwarf planet Ceres, which orbits in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and in some meteorites.
“These minerals require prolonged contact between liquid water and rock to form,” said planetary scientist Ryleigh Davis, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, San Diego, and lead author of the study published in the journal Science Advances.
“The moons themselves are far too small and cold for that chemistry to have occurred in place, so the clay had to come from somewhere else the deep interior of a much larger ancient world. Finding this material on Neptune’s inner moons points to a catastrophic event in Neptune’s past that destroyed those ancient worlds and exposed their deep interiors, with the small moons and rings we see today re-forming from that wreckage,” said Davis, who worked on the study while at Caltech.
