Astronomers are slowly shedding light on dark objects lurking in the narrow part of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. In a new study, researchers found that 10 known asteroids have very similar properties to a dwarf planet, the largest object in the belt. Ceresincluding minerals formed by reaction with liquid water on their surfaces. According to his predictions, these asteroidsSimilar to Ceres, which formed just 1.5 to 3.5 million years after the birth of our solar system, making them important remnants of the complex chemical and physical processes that took place in the early solar nebula.

“These asteroids are almost as old as our solar system,” planetary scientist Dris Thakir from NASA’s Astromaterials Research and Discovery Division and lead author of the study told Space.com in an email.

Recently studied objects belong to the family of dark asteroids. eldest in the asteroid belt. their reflectivity or albedo, are less than 0.09 and have diameters over 62 miles (100 kilometers). More than 200 such objects are known to exist in the asteroid belt, Thakir said, so continued research will likely reveal more Ceres-like asteroids.

The current group includes 24 Themis, the first closest asteroid. with traces of water ice on the surfaceand Cybele, who sowed 65 seeds second place. While their history and spectral features are similar to those of Ceres, there are clues in organic material —Researchers don’t yet know why most of them are at or beyond 3 AU (astronomical units) or 278,867,421 miles (448,793,610 km) from Ceres’ orbit. (One AU is the average Earth-Sun distance, about 93 million miles or 150 million kilometers.)

Thakir’s team used NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii to study 10 near-infrared asteroids. They used an observing technique called near-infrared reflection spectroscopy, which allows them to calculate how much sunlight is reflecting off the surface of the asteroids. This has helped researchers study the mineral and chemical compositions of surfaces unlike “any meteorite in our terrestrial meteorite collections,” Takir told Space.com.

This may be because volatile-rich materials ejected from asteroid surfaces tend not to survive the voyage. earth atmosphere, noted Takir. The closest category the researchers found to the second group of asteroids is Ceres – carbonaceous chondrite grade. Thakir’s team also found that these Ceres-like asteroids are very porous due to the cold air away from the sun, which prevents them from forming into compact rock-like structures.