The past of the largest asteroid in the solar system.

The sun at that time of formation was colder, it was weaker and the solar system in general was colder, so many of the protoplanets could be similar to the current Enceladus. Enceladus is not a protoplanet, it is one of the moons of Saturn, but many of those hundreds of protoplanets must have been very similar to this moon.

Enceladus is around 500 km in diameter, a little more, it has a winged crust and a slightly differentiated rock core and it also has an ocean of liquid water heated thanks to the gravitational pull, in the case of Enceladus with Jupiter and in that ocean of liquid water you can find many of the elements necessary to form those molecules, those building blocks of organic molecules because in addition there are also salts and there are a lot of elements related to that type of things.

We know this because specifically on Enceladus there are geysers that release water when expelled from the interior. The water inside is believed to be sometimes compared to melting ice cream, so the elements found on the asteroid Benum related to water and organic molecules were until now assumed to have come from a protoplanet similar to Enceladus, which for some reason was destroyed, probably due to the impact with another similar protoplanet or with a giant asteroid.

A solar system with small protoplanets with icy crusts and water inside destroying each other or ending up impacting the planets in formation, for example, one of these perhaps impacted with the Earth, excuse me, imagine one of these protoplanets of about 500 km in diameter with a large amount of ice, with water in its interior, with basic elements and molecules for the formation of life in its interior impacting with the primitive earth, perhaps it would be destroyed before impact. enter an orbit with the Earth and break up and its fragments fall on the Earth.

It would provide the Earth with a large amount of water and also with a large amount of organic molecules. The latest discovery was published on April 23, it is about the giant asteroid Vesta. Vesta is 530 km in diameter. If we have an impact with it, it would be the end of the Earth forever. It is the largest asteroid in the solar system. from NASA.

The largest was previously Ceres with 940 km in diameter, but Ceres has risen in category and is now a dwarf planet, a dwarf planet, but a planet, by the way, Ceres is believed to be the last of the protoplanets, at least the last one that has survived in the region of the planets, it is possible that some have been thrown to the outside of the solar system and that they are wandering around the sun beyond Pluto, Vesta was visited by a NASA Dawn spacecraft that He studied it in 2011.

The official discovery of Vesta was on March 29, 1807 by the German astronomer Heinrich Overs, who also discovered Pallas and also proposed that both objects were the remains of a destroyed planet, but the scientific community rejected that theory. The basic argument of the scientific community is that if we put together all the material in the asteroid belt, it does not even reach 5% of the mass of our moon, so it was very little for a planet, although of course that is our current view, it may have been in the past thousands of years ago. Millions of years there would be much more mass in the asteroid belt and the planets, especially Jupiter, would have captured that material or would have thrown it outside the solar system.

To date, the official theories were first that Vesta was a simple giant asteroid and in the last 30 or 40 years it was thought that Vesta was a protoplanet, that is, that it had the basic characteristics of a planet embryo with a crust, mantle and core, that is, the interior was differentiated because gravity attracts the heavier materials towards the center. In fact, some astronomers were, until recently, defending the idea of ​​elevating Vesta to the category of a dwarf planet even though it has no shape. spherical, but this is what was believed until now.

A new study led by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has destroyed that image, it seems that in the end Heinrich Overs 185 years after his death was right and Vesta is the rest of a planet that was destroyed, they have reached this conclusion by analyzing the core of Vesta and discover that its core is very small and that Vesta did not undergo a differentiation of materials by layers as would occur in a protoplanet, so the researchers reach two conclusions.

The first would be that the interior of Vesta did not experience a complete difference due to a late formation, the second argument or second possibility would be that Vesta originated as an impact remnant of an already differentiated body, a larger body, a planet, due to a catastrophic impact.

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