4 ms·

Wow: “Meanwhile they were heating up, mainly from the radioactive element Aluminum-26. The amount of energy this element released during the first 2 to 3 millio

Wow: “Meanwhile they were heating up, mainly from the radioactive element Aluminum-26. The amount of energy this element released during the first 2 to 3 million years of solar system history amounts to more than all of the heat released by all other sources over the past 4.5 billion years (except for the sun, of course).”

feoren 4y ago
I was surprised to see that such a silly, narrow-minded, and misleading statement actually came from one of the authors of the paper, and not an editorializing pop-science writer. First of all, it's obvious that it amounts to more than all the heat released by all other sources that we know of. How is it that we discover this new interesting way heat could have been released, and it doesn't occur to us that maybe there are other new interesting ways heat could have been released that we haven't discovered yet? The very discovery of that mechanism is exactly evidence that we have not yet discovered all possible sources of heat in the early universe. It's crazy that I need to point this out. Secondly, it's worded extremely misleadingly. The article goes "Ceres did this; Ceres did that; it's a member of this type of body; these bodies involved this element; this element was the source of a tremendous amount of heat". What produced all that heat? Not Ceres. Not carbonaceous asteroids. Aluminum-26 around the entire solar system. Most of that heat generation could have occurred (and probably did occur) in the core of Jupiter, not in Ceres. Yet it makes it sound like early Ceres was a huge source of heat in the solar system. This is a pretty extreme amount of carelessness from this author.
- icehawk 4y ago
  The wording seemed fairly straightforward given the given the context. The sentence itself speaks about the "solar system history," mentioning the sun for comparison, and the paragraph after that attributes the heating of planetesimals to Aluminum-26 specifically. Ceres is not even mentioned in the two paragraphs that describe heating.

feoren 4y ago

I was surprised to see that such a silly, narrow-minded, and misleading statement actually came from one of the authors of the paper, and not an editorializing pop-science writer. First of all, it's obvious that it amounts to more than all the heat released by all other sources that we know of. How is it that we discover this new interesting way heat could have been released, and it doesn't occur to us that maybe there are other new interesting ways heat could have been released that we haven't discovered yet? The very discovery of that mechanism is exactly evidence that we have not yet discovered all possible sources of heat in the early universe. It's crazy that I need to point this out. Secondly, it's worded extremely misleadingly. The article goes "Ceres did this; Ceres did that; it's a member of this type of body; these bodies involved this element; this element was the source of a tremendous amount of heat". What produced all that heat? Not Ceres. Not carbonaceous asteroids. Aluminum-26 around the entire solar system. Most of that heat generation could have occurred (and probably did occur) in the core of Jupiter, not in Ceres. Yet it makes it sound like early Ceres was a huge source of heat in the solar system. This is a pretty extreme amount of carelessness from this author.

icehawk 4y ago
The wording seemed fairly straightforward given the given the context. The sentence itself speaks about the "solar system history," mentioning the sun for comparison, and the paragraph after that attributes the heating of planetesimals to Aluminum-26 specifically. Ceres is not even mentioned in the two paragraphs that describe heating.