Ceres Archives - DOES GOD EXIST? TODAY

We recently reported that there are massive amounts of water in the cosmos. Now, more evidence points to water in the Milky Way Galaxy.

An asteroid belt exists between Mars and Jupiter. Astronomers believe that this belt of material is either a planet that disintegrated or one that never formed because of the gravitational pushes and pulls of Jupiter and Mars. In 2007, NASA launched a probe called Dawn. In 2015, it arrived at one of the largest asteroids named Ceres. The Dawn probe revealed several strange white spots, especially in the Occator Crater. In August of 2020, astronomers presented several papers dealing with evidence that the white spots are ejections of salty water produced from holes punched into Ceres’ surface by space rocks.

Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute was involved in the NASA research on Ceres. He is quoted as saying that this discovery is “one of the most profound discoveries in planetary science in the space age.” The Occator Crater is 57 miles (92 km) wide. The material erupting through fractures looks very much like Utah’s Great Salt Lake.

Astronomers suggest that our solar system has large amounts of water stored in the moons of Jupiter and Saturn and Pluto’s surface. Trying to put together a model that explains the formation of wet moons and objects like Ceres is proving to be quite difficult. It appears that whatever the cause, our solar system has a unique water signature.

The abundance of water in the Milky Way Galaxy may turn out to be very important if humans venture into space and start establishing colonies on other worlds. Did God prepare a stepping stone for humans to move beyond Earth’s limitations by placing essential water in our solar system? Perhaps, but as we have said before, we face many other challenges as we venture away from our home planet.

Data from Discover magazine, January/February 2021 pages 58-59.

Ceres Organic Material. Life on Ceres? — Ceres Organic Material

News items in the media in early March have made the spectacular announcement that “life material” has been found on Ceres, an asteroid in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Technically that announcement is correct, with the weasel word being “life material.” NASA was very careful to announce that they have “not actually found any signs of life on the dwarf planet.” Rather than finding life on Ceres, what they found is a spectrograph of light reflected from the surface giving the same pattern as seen in hydrocarbons on Earth–specifically kerite and asphaltite.

We have pointed out repeatedly that finding life on Ceres or anywhere in space is not a biblical issue. The Bible doesn’t tell us that God did not create life elsewhere, and He very well may have. There is a deeper motive for announcements like this one. If you are going to teach that life began in a primeval soup full of organic molecules, you have to find the molecules to put into the soup. Amino acids have been found in meteorites and in dark nebulae, but most have been small and very limited in complexity.

Life and its formation are so complex that even having the “soup” doesn’t tell you much about how life could have formed. The picture that is emerging of the early days of Earth does not show an environment hospitable to the organic soup that is postulated by some cosmologists. The assumption of anaerobic conditions is not valid, and the number of agents hostile to life existing seems to grow with every passing discovery. Future studies will tell us more about how God prepared the Earth and perhaps the universe for life, but none of this is a threat to the faith of those who believe that God is the creator of all we see.

Data from Science News, March 18, 2017.

Tag: Ceres

Water in the Milky Way Galaxy

Life on Ceres?