Ceres

Ceres, formerly known as Asteroid 1 Ceres, is the first identified object in the asteroid belt, and the largest. Giuseppe Piazzi discovered it on January 1, 1801. Recently, in the wake of the Eris-Pluto controversy, the International Astronomical Union has declared that it is more than a mere asteroid and qualifies as a dwarf planet.

Discovery
Piazzi was searching for the "missing planet" that, according to the Titius-Bode Law, should exist between Mars and Jupiter. Bode's law predicted an object having a semi-major axis of 2.8 AU, remarkably close to the actual semi-major axis of Ceres.

When Piazzi first observed Ceres, he thought he was looking at a comet. But comets normally move much faster than Ceres does, a fact Piazzi appreciated. He observed Ceres 24 times and reported his discoveries to Bode and other astronomers.

Shortly after the publication of Piazzi's findings, Ceres was lost in the glare of the sun. Karl Friedrich Gauss, then 24 years old, predicted Ceres' path and suggested where to look to reacquire Ceres. On December 31, 1801, the astronomer Baron von Zach found Ceres very near where Gauss said he might.

Status
For many years Ceres was listed as a planet, even after the asteroids Pallas, Juno, and Vesta were discovered. With the discovery of yet more objects in what would later be known as the Asteroid Belt, Ceres was reclassified as an asteroid, the largest of all such bodies. But Ceres, unlike any other object in the asteroid belt, has a hydrostatic-equilibrium shape, characteristic of an object sufficiently massive that its self-gravity forces such a shape despite the rigid-body forces that normally hold a solid object's shape.

In 2006, the discovery of Eris provoked a fresh look at all the bodies of the solar system, and in particular what constituted a planet and what didn't. As a result of the debate, Eris and Pluto, an object even smaller than Eris, were classed as dwarf planets&mdash;a new classification with definite criteria. Ceres meets these criteria, and thus Ceres is considered a dwarf planet&mdash;the smallest of three known bodies of that class.

Composition
In 2005, observations made by the Hubble Space Telescope suggest that Ceres might be very rich in water ice. Specifically, astronomers have concluded that Ceres has a layered interior, with a rocky inner core, a thick layer of water ice, and a dusty outer crust. McFadden speculated that Ceres was an "embryonic planet," one that (according to evolutionary theory) tried to form a planet but could not because Jupiter, being so close, so perturbed the local gravitational field that Ceres could not grow any larger than it is. Findings supporting the water-ice theory include:


 * 1) Most objects having hydrostatic-equilibrium or round shape have differentiated, or layered, interiors.
 * 2) Spectrography of the surface shows evidence of water-bearing minerals.

Parker and his colleagues speculated that Ceres might be composed of 25% water and thus have more fresh water than in all the fresh-water sources on earth.

On January 23, 2014, came confirmation of this abundance of water. Küppers et al. reported on observations from the Herschel space telescope, of water vapor gushing out from two discrete locations on the surface of Ceres, at the prodigious rate of 1026 molecules per second from each of them, for a total rate of thirteen pounds per second.

Walter T. Brown, originator of the Hydroplate theory of the Global flood, claimed immediate vindication. In his book In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood, he had confidently predicted:A deep, penetrating impact on a large asteroid, such as Ceres, will release huge volumes of water vapor.

Satellites
Ceres has no known satellites.

Observation and Exploration
Until today, the only observation of Ceres has been by telescope. Astronomers have inferred a remarkable number of the physical properties of Ceres from this observation, but wish to learn much more.

On September 27, 2007, the Dawn mission began officially with the launch of Dawn, the first rocket probe to visit the asteroid belt. The Dawn craft carries an ion engine that it used on the second part of its journey after it makes rendezvous with Mars. Dawn entered orbit around the asteroid Vesta and then departed Vesta for the dwarf planet Ceres. It will reach Ceres in February of 2015 and will then become the first space probe ever to orbit two celestial bodies other than the earth.

Walter T. Brown eagerly awaits the mass-spectrographic analysis of the water-vapor gushers on Ceres (see above). He predicts that analysis will show Ceres' water vapor rich in deuterium, and at twice the concentration in the oceans of Earth. This will provide further vindication of the Hydroplate Theory.

Problems for uniformitarian theories
The recent discovery of water vapor issuing so prodigiously from the surface of Ceres presents two problems for uniformitarian theories of the origin of Ceres: how could a body that side, having so much water in it, form inside the frost line of the solar system? By conventional theory, no body, holding so much water ice, should form any closer to the solar system than 5 AU. The aphelion of Ceres is less than 3 AU.

The Dawn space probe will likely conduct mass-spectrography analysis of this water vapor. It could find that Ceres is rich in deuterium, at twice the concentration found in the oceans of Earth. If so, that raises another question: what kind of nuclear catastrophe could possibly have occurred, off the earth but still within the solar system, that could have flooded the system with enough neutrons to turn so much light hydrogen into heavy hydrogen? To produce such a neutron flux would require detonating an impossibly large number of neutron bombs.

No supernova could do that without destroying our solar system itself. Any model suggesting otherwise would violate the Law of Inverse Squares. So that nuclear disaster must have happened within the solar system. On earth, such a disaster likely happened. The earthquakes attendant on the Global Flood acted in quartz buried in the earth's crust. By so doing, it produced electromotive potentials that turned vast amounts of buried minerals into atomic plasma, free to fuse, split, and decay by cluster. And in that process they produced a sea of neutrons, which the water of the subcrustal ocean obsorbed even as it was escaping its confinement. When hydrogen picks up a neutron, it becomes deuterium.

Comets possess deuterium in twice the concentration that one finds in the oceans of earth. That's already difficult enough to explain, so that no conventional astronomer has even tried. But Ceres might hold more water than one can find in all the fresh-water springs, rivers and lakes on earth. If that water is rich in deuterium, the explanation will become even more difficult.

Related Links

 * Ceres by Wikipedia
 * Hamilton, Calvin J. "Dwarf planet Ceres." Views of the Solar System, 2007. Accessed January 22, 2008.

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