LuV The/Chapter II. Where it came from

The space between Mars and Jupiter is occupied by the Asteroid belt, where thousands of small astronomical bodies orbits the Sun and sometimes collide with each other. The biggest of them differs from others so much that in 2006 it was categorized as a dwarf planet.

Ceres has a diameter of 940 km, which is about a quarter that of the Moon. And it contains an estimated 40% of total mass of the Asteroid belt.

Not like other asteroids, Ceres has differentiated geological structure. This was revealed after one of NASA missions approached Ceres' orbit in 2015.

Dawn mission found Ceres's surface to be a mixture of water ice and hydrated minerals. Underneath should lay an internal ocean of liquid water, presence of which must explain low average density of the dwarf planet. In the center there are rocky structures.

Definitive evidence of water ice appeared when Dawn observed extremely bright spots on Ceres. Part of them were considered cryovolcanoes that expose salty water from beneath. And others were recognized as melting zones inside impact craters. After all there were made some calculations, which pointed that a quarter of Ceres' mass and 50% of its overall volume is water ice.

There is another one interesting calculation, stating that after few billion years of chaotic and occasionally interrelated orbital drifting the belt's total mass decreased for 1,000 times. In other words its initial population was far greater than it is now.

Relying upon this new data, we cannot reject an idea that previously there were even more Ceres-like ice-covered bodies orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. So let us hypothesize that the Moon was one of those dwarf planets.

Yes, this is a new theory of the Moon's origin! It supposes that our satellite was formed in the Main Belt, and had an upper layer made of ice in the early solar-system history.

To the beginning...

This is chapter II.

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