YouTube: https://youtube.com/watch?v=8kimML8PAbg
Previous: To Study the Universe, This Town Still Bans Cell Phones
Next: The Sorry State of Dark Matter Alternatives

Categories

Statistics

View count:93,821
Likes:3,844
Comments:215
Duration:06:05
Uploaded:2018-09-21
Last sync:2024-03-23 15:15

Citation

Citation formatting is not guaranteed to be accurate.
MLA Full: "Found: Dozens of Ancient Cryovolcanoes on Ceres! | SciShow News." YouTube, uploaded by , 21 September 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kimML8PAbg.
MLA Inline: (, 2018)
APA Full: . (2018, September 21). Found: Dozens of Ancient Cryovolcanoes on Ceres! | SciShow News [Video]. YouTube. https://youtube.com/watch?v=8kimML8PAbg
APA Inline: (, 2018)
Chicago Full: , "Found: Dozens of Ancient Cryovolcanoes on Ceres! | SciShow News.", September 21, 2018, YouTube, 06:05,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=8kimML8PAbg.
Scientists may have discovered up to 31 more cryovolcano remnants on Ceres, and the Iridium flares are slowly being allowed to burn up in our atmosphere, so see them while you still can!

#Flarewell Campaign: https://www.iridium.com/flarewell/

Hosted by: Hank Green

For special, curated artifacts of this universe, check out https://scishowfinds.com/
----------
Support SciShow by becoming a patron on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/scishow
----------
Dooblydoo thanks go to the following Patreon supporters:
Lazarus G, Sam Lutfi, D.A. Noe, سلطان الخليفي, Piya Shedden, KatieMarie Magnone, Scott Satovsky Jr, Charles Southerland, Patrick D. Ashmore, Tim Curwick, charles george, Kevin Bealer, Chris Peters
----------
Like SciShow? Want to help support us, and also get things to put on your walls, cover your torso and hold your liquids? Check out our awesome products over at DFTBA Records: http://dftba.com/scishow
----------
Looking for SciShow elsewhere on the internet?
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/scishow
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/scishow
Tumblr: http://scishow.tumblr.com
Instagram: http://instagram.com/thescishow
----------
Sources:

https://press.nature.com/wp-content/uploads/files/2018/09/41550_2018_574_OnlinePDF.pdf
https://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov

http://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/news/iridium-flares-cease-end-2018
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/01/skywatching-iridium-flares-spacex-satellites-space-science/
http://investor.iridium.com/2018-07-25-Iridium-Completes-Seventh-Successful-Iridium-R-NEXT-Launch
https://www.iridium.com/network/globalnetwork/
https://www.rocketlaunch.live/?filter=spacex
https://www.iridium.com/flarewell/

Images:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fountains_of_Enceladus_PIA07758.jpg
https://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/image-detail.html?id=PIA18921
https://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/ceres.html?view=grid_view&start=12
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PIA21919-Ceres-DwarfPlanet-AhunaMons-20180314.jpg
https://www.flickr.com/photos/seabirdnz/23655329842
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Iridium_Satellite.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Iridium_flare_2008_08_11.jpg

Thumbnail Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PIA20348_crop_-_Ceres%27_Ahuna_Mons_top_view.jpg
[♪ INTRO].

The solar system, it turns out, is full of volcanoes, but not all of them spew or ooze liquid rock, like you might tend to picture. Where it’s cold enough, we also see evidence of cryovolcanoes that spit out slushy ices.

So far, we’ve found them on several gas giant moons and on Pluto. And we’ve even found one in the asteroid belt, on the dwarf planet Ceres. Now, scientists reported this week in Nature Astronomy that they may have discovered up to 31 more cryovolcano remnants on Ceres.

It’s a volcano wonderland. In 2015, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft arrived at Ceres, and it’s been mapping and studying the object’s surface ever since. During its first year, Dawn found one cryovolcano that formed the mountain Ahuna Mons.

It’s probably less than 240 million years old, which isn’t that ancient when you’re talking about space volcanoes. To really understand Ceres’s history, researchers need to study older volcanoes. But it’s been harder to find any, because the material they’re made out of sags and flattens over time.

At least, that’s what astronomers hypothesized. To confirm that, the team analyzed images of Ceres’s surface, looking for large structures that might be flattened-out former cryovolcanoes, or, as they call them, viciously relaxed domes. And they found a ton!

Including Ahuna Mons, the team spotted a whopping 32 candidates. Next, they used Dawn’s camera to estimate the domes’s heights. For 10 of the 32 structures, they couldn’t get clear enough data, so they were excluded from the analysis.

But the rest were all over 1 kilometer tall. Based on a set of assumptions, like how large the domes would have been when they started out, and how much ice they contain, the team estimated the ages of these domes. This time, they were able to date all but one.

They found that most of the structures were between 2 and 700 million years old, but a couple were over 2 billion years old. This all suggests that, over the last billion years,. Ceres got a new cryovolcano every 50 million years or so on average.

Besides teaching us more about Ceres’s history, this study also supported the fact that cryovolcanoes are really different from the hot, lava-spewing mountains on Earth. For one, the icy magma on Ceres may originate in the dwarf planet’s crust, not in any sort of mantle like we see on terrestrial planets. Ceres is also a lot less active.

This new study found that the total amount of matter put out by its cryovolcanoes is between 1000 and 100,000 times less than that of the inner planets and the Moon. Even if you account for surface area, terrestrial volcanic activity is still an order of magnitude higher. This could mean that all cryovolcanic bodies, including places like Pluto and Europa, have similarly low activity, but we’ll need more data to know for sure.

Still, any day where you find a bunch of new volcanoes in the asteroid belt is a pretty good day. Without a telescope or a good pair of binoculars, you probably won’t be able to see Ceres from Earth. But if you look up on a clear night, you might see a light zooming across the sky for just a few seconds.

It’s not a meteor, and it’s probably not a UFO. Instead, it’s what’s called a satellite flare: a satellite unintentionally catching the light of the Sun and bouncing it down to you. The brightest of these are called Iridium flares, but you’ll only be able to see them easily for a little while longer.

So consider this your heads-up. These flares started around 1997, and they come from a group of. Low-Earth orbit communications satellites.

They’re controlled by Iridium Communications Inc., hence the name. They’re not actually made of iridium or anything. The flares come from sunlight bouncing off the three silver-coated antennae on each satellite.

If the angle is just right, they’re bright enough to outshine Venus, and even to be visible during the day. But Iridium’s network of 66 satellites is being replaced right now, with a fleet of 75 smaller ones. These new ones aren’t the same shape, so they won’t produce any flares.

As of July 2018, there have been seven successful launches to install new, flare-less satellites, and the eighth and final launch is scheduled for November. With the new guard coming in, some of the old satellites have already begun de-orbiting, and they will be spiraling down until they’re burned up by the Earth’s atmosphere. But they won’t fall out of the sky all at once.

The different satellites all have their own paths to destruction, and for some of them, that process could take up to 20 years. So while the number of Iridium flares will drop drastically in the next year or so, you might manage to catch one every once in a while. It will just be much harder.

I remember when I was a teen, my dad took me out into the nighttime to be like, there’s the new iridium satellites, and he timed it so that we could watch it together cuz he’s a big nerd. Today, since the satellites’ orbits are actively controlled, it’s really easy to calculate when and where you need to be to see a flare, but that will change soon. The good news for sky-watchers is that, even once the first Iridium satellites are gone, other satellite flares will still be out there.

They’re just not as spectacular. And while you and I might be a little sad about that, at least one group of people will be happy: astronomers. Since Iridium flares are so bright, they tend to turn up as annoying streaks in study images.

So at least somebody’s happy about these satellites getting destroyed by the friction of the atmosphere. If you’re interested in checking out the last predictable Iridium flares, the company has some resources to help you out, and we’ll leave a link to them in the description. They even have a bit of a social media campaign about it.

It’s called #Flarewell, because they just, I guess they had to do that. Thanks for watching this episode of SciShow Space News! We’ve got a new piece of merch: These SciShow lab coats which you might recognize if you watch SciShow Quiz Show.

But there’s only a limited number of them, cuz we found them in a warehouse, so if you want to look fancy in the lab, and show your support for SciShow, head on over to dftba.com/scishow right now to pick one up! It’s got the normal pockets, and then it’s got this pocket so that you can get your pocket, inside pocket, without going like this. It goes like that. [♪ OUTRO].