Ceres & Life's Building Blocks

[LordFerret]

I've been all over the web looking, but I've yet to find out which organic molecules were found. It appears they're a bit reluctant to say. The main source is a periodical I'm not wanting to pay for.

http://www.space.com/35729-dwarf-planet-ceres-organic-molecules.html

Anyone with a heads-up on this?

[kerbiloid]

This local splash of organics looks like somebody's landing was not too much successfull, but gave us the crater Ernutet.

Or a spaceship of The First Ones lost its sewer container with the same result.

[KSK]

14 hours ago, LordFerret said:

I've been all over the web looking, but I've yet to find out which organic molecules were found. It appears they're a bit reluctant to say. The main source is a periodical I'm not wanting to pay for.

http://www.space.com/35729-dwarf-planet-ceres-organic-molecules.html

Anyone with a heads-up on this?

From the abstract:

"The combined presence on Ceres of ammonia-bearing hydrated minerals, water ice, carbonates, salts, and organic material indicates a very complex chemical environment, suggesting favorable environments to prebiotic chemistry."

From the main text:

"The pronounced difference in the 3.3- to 3.6-μm region between the surface around Ernunet crater and regions further away (Fig. 1) indicates the presence of additional absorbing species in the latter. These species are able to produce a distinctive absorption (at 3.4 μm) without appreciably affecting the remaining parts of the spectrum. The main candidates for this band are materials containing C–H bonds, including a variety of organic materials, such as hydrogenated amorphous carbon and complex residues produced by the irradiation of different ices (17–19). All these species are broadly described as “organics,” and we will use the term “organic-rich” (OR) to describe the spectrum and the area showing this band."

"The identification of the precise nature of the organic material is challenging. The shape of the band and the lack of a clear 3.3-μm feature allow us to eliminate aromatic species as main carriers of the features on Ceres, whereas hydrogenated sp³ carbon can be identified from the antisymmetric and symmetric stretching modes of methyl and methylene functional groups. Thus, we can exclude organics with a high content of aromatic carbon (like anthraxolites) in favor of hydrocarbons rich in aliphatic carbon (like asphaltite and kerite). However, a further discrimination among different aliphatic-rich organics is difficult. Furthermore, we used a nonlinear mixing algorithm (24) and found a good match with an intimate mixture of ~4 to 9% of aliphatic hydrocarbons (table S1). The specific value of the abundance of organics depends on the spectral end-member, i.e., kerite or asphaltite (25), used in the fitting procedure. Although the best fit is achieved with 5% of kerite, asphaltite also provides a good result (Fig. 3). Therefore, we cannot clearly identify the specific aliphatic compound present on Ceres. In addition, IOM materials are very good spectral analogs of Ceres OR, but the available laboratory spectra of IOM lack absolute reflectance and thus cannot be used for the fitting procedure."

 

IOM - Insoluble Organic Matter. As opposed to SOM for Soluble Organic Matter. SOM can be found in carbonaceous chondrites and can include biotically interesting compounds such as amino acids, nucleobases, sugars, and monocarboxylic acids. So yeah - organics on Ceres but more the stuff that you might pave roads with than build little green aliens with.

 

Edited February 17, 2017 by KSK

[Green Baron]

This is probably the source:

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6326/692

To make this clear once and for all, before everyone cries out "Life !! I knew it !!". That is not necessarily a surprise and these molecules are not rare in our solar system.

Edited February 17, 2017 by Green Baron

[Green Baron]

1 hour ago, KSK said:

... that you might pave roads with ...

 

*Cough*, well, that what we pave the roads with are the remains of that what once did live. I only hope nobody draws an analogy now :-)

 

[CatastrophicFailure]

7 hours ago, KSK said:

From the main text:

I understood some of those words. 

5 hours ago, Green Baron said:

I only hope nobody draws an analogy now :-)

Great Ceasar's Ghost, CERES IS A GIANT INTERPLANETARY SPACE DINOSAUR!!!!! Run! Panic! Chaos!

Quick, nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure!!!!!

[kerbiloid]

5 hours ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

Great Ceasar's Ghost, CERES IS A GIANT INTERPLANETARY SPACE DINOSAUR!!!!! Run! Panic! Chaos!

Just a Giga Shadow.

Spoiler

Well, as we already have a derelict (hybernated?) Death Star near Saturn, this was just a question of time.

[LordFerret]

6 hours ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

CERES IS A GIANT INTERPLANETARY SPACE DINOSAUR!!!!!

Either that, or there's an abiotic process going on that's in line with another argument floating around these days.

 

Thank you @KSK

[CatastrophicFailure]

15 minutes ago, LordFerret said:

Either that, or there's an abiotic process going on that's in line with another argument floating around these days.

 

 . . . Expound?

[KSK]

2 hours ago, LordFerret said:

Either that, or there's an abiotic process going on that's in line with another argument floating around these days.

Thank you @KSK

You're welcome. 

 

8 hours ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

Great Ceasar's Ghost, CERES IS A GIANT INTERPLANETARY SPACE DINOSAUR!!!!! Run! Panic! Chaos!

And if Dres is supposed to be the in-game Ceres analogue....

*runs away grinning evilly*

 

Edited February 18, 2017 by KSK

[kerbiloid]

4 hours ago, KSK said:

And if Dres is supposed to be the in-game Ceres analogue....

Dres canyon is where its head meets its... counter-head.

Edited February 18, 2017 by kerbiloid

[LordFerret]

11 hours ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

 . . . Expound?

I'd have thought that to have been obvious... abiotic oil production within the Earth.

[CatastrophicFailure]

1 hour ago, LordFerret said:

I'd have thought that to have been obvious... abiotic oil production within the Earth.

...there is such a thing?

[KSK]

20 minutes ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

...there is such a thing?

Well the gunk on Ceres is basically bitumen. Crack that (or don't let the relevant reactions run as long) and you get oil or a reasonable facsimile of it. And jokes aside, I'm pretty sure that it couldn't have been a fossil material so presumably it was created through an abiotic route. On Earth though - *shrugs*. The Wikipedia article looks like a good place to start.

[Green Baron]

35 minutes ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

...there is such a thing?

Well, like reactionless thrusters, or so :-)

Sorry, not that i knew, it was sort of a debate long ago, though it would be nice.

Ninja'd. @KSK, Wikipedia, really ? ;-/ :-)

 

But we could start a discussion on what is biogenic and what is abiogenic ...

Edit: *scratchhead* didn't we have that some time ago ? *toolazytosearch*

Edited February 18, 2017 by Green Baron

[KSK]

Yup. Wikipedia isn't all that bad. If nothing else it usually provides a decent 'what the words mean' layperson's summary backed up with links to follow for more information. 

I never mind cribbing information from Wikipedia during discussions, although I'm usually pretty careful to cite my source too, so others can decide how valid my arguments are based on that source.

Darn that sounds po-faced. Sorry - here endeth the lecture.

[Green Baron]

I use Wikipedia for hard facts only, things that are difficult to debate. In this case, the abiogenic oil thing was partly advertised by a soviet group, so the danger is to fall for propaganda ...

I have absolutely no problem with a lecture :-), but I keep things the other way round, if i find nothing in the scientific journals then it doesn't exist. Not that i pretend that this is the right way and i might miss many things.

 

[LordFerret]

Without having to resort to posting any links, as in support for/against the idea, a simple web search on the topic will pull up plenty of articles about it. Granted, some of those articles aren't worth the screen-space they'll show up on, but others (more legitimate research/speculation on the subject) are worth examining.

My opinion: Simply, we cannot say for sure yet. We know too little about it. We know more about the Moon... maybe not literally, but you get my point. There are compelling arguments for both cases. There is a chance that both cases could be true. However, I don't feel that statement holds true for Ceres.

[Green Baron]

Now i'm wearing the lecturer's hat :-)

The real science, sedimentary geology, knows nothing about abiogenic oil on earth. Yeah, maybe such processes exist, but that's guessing, not science, and all that guessing is starting to harm real science.

And the original idea was about abiogenic to replace biogenic oil, which has a political aspect in it and does not reflect the natural processes, from a geoscience point of view.

Edit: no offense to you guys, don't get me wrong :-) I might be wrong.

Edited February 19, 2017 by Green Baron