ALMA Spectral Observations of the Ceres Icy World

Yo-Ling Chuang^1*, Yi-Jehng Kuan¹, Steven B. Charnley², Ming-Chi Chung¹, Yu-Fu Yeh¹, Wei-Ling Tseng¹

¹Earth Sciences, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan
²Goddard Center for Astrobiology, NASA/GSFC, Greenbelt, Maryland, USA

* Presenter:Yo-Ling Chuang, email:ylchuang@ntnu.edu.tw

Icy worlds in our Solar System such as Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, Enceladus and Titan are possessed of surface organics and have known subsurface oceans, hence are important astrobiologically. Other icy Solar-System bodies such as Ceres, Pluto, Triton and Dione are also considered candidates for ocean worlds. In particular, among these icy bodies, water vapor was detected from Ceres, the sole dwarf planet in the inner Solar System and the largest member in the Main Asteroid Belt, by Herschel infrared space telescope. Besides, data returned from the Dawn space mission suggest a subsurface layer of briny water ice, along with ammonia-rich clays, may exist on Ceres. We thus conducted ground-based observations with the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to search for molecular emission in Ceres’ exosphere. In this meeting, we will present new findings from our observations and discuss their astrobiological implications.

Keywords: Small body, Asteroid, Radio observation