Scientific American performs a fun bit of guesswork as to what is causing those mysterious bright spots on the dwarf planet Ceres.
Their best guess so far? Ice-volcanoes!
How much more weird can you get? (Of course, an alien outpost of massively tall structures full of all the solutions we need here on Earth would be weird and cool, but I’m not holding my breath!)
Scientific American explains: Ceres is believed to be made of at least one-quarter ice, more so than most asteroids. Dawn’s goal is to figure out where that ice resides and what role it plays in shaping the asteroid’s surface. One idea is that the ice is blanketed by a very thin layer of soil. The ice may occasionally squirt up in towering ‘cryovolcanoes’, thanks to internal pressures within the asteroid.
“What is amazing is that you can see the feature while the rim is still in the line of sight,” said Andreas Nathues, a planetary scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany, told the magazine.
Drive on Dawn, drive on!
JPL Caption: This animated gif is composed of several images that NASA’s Dawn spacecraft took on approach to Ceres on Feb. 4, 2015 at a distance of about 90,000 miles (145,000 kilometers) from the dwarf planet. This series of images is the sharpest to date, at a resolution of 8.5 miles (14 kilometers) per pixel.
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