Giant mud balls roamed the early solar system
Rethinking early asteroids’ rockiness could solve some meteorite mysteries
MUDDY OCEAN? The dwarf planet Ceres could have once been a ball of mud with a solid core, a new model suggests.
IDA/DLR/MPS/UCLA/JPL-Caltech/NASA
The earliest asteroids were probably made of mud, not rock.
Radioactive heat in the early solar system could have melted globs of dust and ice before they had a chance to turn to rock, a new simulation published July 14 in Science Advances shows.