NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/ASI/INAF
Infrared images suggest that Spot 1 (top row), an area on Ceres, is made of ice. But the pair of bright gleams known as Spot 5 were invisible to an infrared camera (bottom right).
Posted on 04/13/2015 12:28:08 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Not all of the puzzling bright spots on the dwarf planet Ceres are alike. The closest-yet images of the gleams, taken from 45,000 kilometres away, suggest that at least two of the spots look different from one another when seen in infrared wavelengths.
The Hubble Space Telescope spied many of the bright spots from afar years ago, but the observations from NASA's Dawn spacecraft — which began looping around Ceres on 6 March — are the first at close range. The images were released on 13 April in Vienna, Austria, at a meeting of the European Geosciences Union.
Scientists say that the bright spots may be related to ice exposed at the bottom of impact craters or from some kind of active geology. They glimmer tantalizingly in a new full-colour map of Ceres, obtained in February but released at the conference. The map uses false colours to tease out slight differences on the otherwise dark surface of Ceres.
“This is the first idea of what the surface looks like,” said Martin Hoffmann, a Dawn scientist from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany.
Dawn is beginning to sharpen its view of the bright spots as it gets closer to Ceres. The new infrared images compare Spot 1, near Ceres' equator, with a pair of bright spots collectively known as Spot 5. Some scientists have speculated that the latter could be linked to an icy plume.
Spot 1 appears darker in images from Dawn's infrared spectrometer, said Federico Tosi, a Dawn scientist at the Institute for Space Astrophysics and Planetology and the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome. That suggests that the area is cooler than the rest of the dwarf planet's surface, supporting the idea that the spot is made of ice.
(Excerpt) Read more at nature.com ...
Infrared images suggest that Spot 1 (top row), an area on Ceres, is made of ice. But the pair of bright gleams known as Spot 5 were invisible to an infrared camera (bottom right).
Are you Ceres? There are ice holes outside Uranus?
This can only be dealt with by raising everyone’s taxes and turning all the money over to the United Nations.
This is hugh and ceres!
Lol, got a chuckle out of me.
:)
Spot 1 is kind of what you’d expect but spot 5 is odd.
Nothing like a good uranus joke lol
Uranus spins sideways, and so does your mother’s.
My guess is Ceres Is Kuiper Belt Object like Pluto with a thin crust of asteroid material from collisions.
Oddly enough, Neptune’s moon Triton is thought to be a captured Kuiper Belt Object.
Spot 5 in Ceres CA ?
Probably just a reflection off a SUV—that is also causing the ice caps on Mars to melt.
/johnny
I’m sure NASA’s already got high resolution pics of the motherships and alien bases in those craters, but they’re never going to let us see them :-(
Geez, everybody knows that Motel 6 has had a franchisee on Ceres for the last decade...
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