Lisa Grossman, reporter
(Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA)
The mini-planet Vesta took a beating in its past - but the ordeal may have delivered carbon to its surface. A new map of dark material in Vesta's craters shows that the huge rocks that formed them brought carbonaceous material along for the ride.
Vesta's surface is marked by material as black as coal, most of it on and around craters like the one in the 3D model above. It wasn't clear, though, where this carbon-rich material had come from. The answer seems to lie in images taken last year that show two gigantic impact craters which must be the results of 50 to 60-kilometre-wide rocks smacking into Vesta's southern hemisphere.
New analysis shows that the first impact brought something with it. A team led by Vishnu Reddy from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Lindau, Germany, mapped the dark stuff on Vesta's surface. They found that it is concentrated around the huge southern craters, and figured that it arrived in the earlier of the two impacts, 2 to 3 billion years ago. Computer simulations of the impact confirmed that it could have created the patterns of dark material we see today.
That suggests that carbon was delivered to Vesta via an asteroid. And Vesta was probably not the only object to receive such a package, the team says. The same delivery system could have brought one of the essential building blocks of life to Earth.
Journal reference: Icarus, 10.1016/j.icarus.2012.08.011
Vesta's crater carbon came from asteroids
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Vesta's crater carbon came from asteroids
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Vesta's crater carbon came from asteroids
