Dawn Spacecraft Gets a Better Look At Ceres' Bizarre 'White Spots' 78
StartsWithABang writes: Since its discovery as the first asteroid more than 200 years ago, Ceres has been one of the most poorly understood objects in the Solar System as even imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope is unable to resolve very much. But NASA's Dawn mission, since moving on from Vesta, has begun to map Ceres, constructing the highest resolution global map ever, with better data to come. The greatest mystery so far are two bright white spots at the bottom of a deep crater, brighter and more reflective than anything else on the planet's surface. Right now, three leading possibilities for the origin of these features exist, with Dawn possessing the capabilities to teach us which one (if any) is correct, hopefully by the end of the year!
Abandoned alien solar panels? (Score:2)
I suppose that counts as option 3...
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Re:Abandoned alien solar panels? (Score:5, Funny)
Don't solar panels specifically not reflect light?
That could be why they're abandoned...
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I vote for gigantic abandoned construct (ship, habitat, etc) that has been covered by millions of years of debris from the asteroid belt and an impact blasted away the rubble making part of it visible. Ah, at least one can hope.
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I suppose that counts as option 3...
It's a dwarf planet, everyone knows that rubbing a dwarf's head bring luck. Well, sucking a dwarf's cock brings even better luck, and well, that is what you get after a planet spits it back on the dwarf.
Just sayin....
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I favor number 4: domed alien cities.
Ceres is dust-covered planetoid whose core is made entirely of cocaine.
Huh (Score:1)
They all seem to appear right where you would expect stress fractures to be on a body shaped like this.
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In several spots along the equatorial region it looks to have some open lava tubes that reinforce the idea of a molten core and active volcanos.
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LOL ... you mean 'round'?
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Appears as more of a flattened ball, disk shaped or is that photo distortion? I guess that's still "round".
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So in OOP terms, "Dwarf" is a sub-class (sub-type) of "Planet". Thus, Ceres still "is-a" Planet per base type membership.
Re:Ceres is a planet now? (Score:5, Funny)
It's a beacon (Score:2)
Nothing natural can do that on that scale. Wonder what it's trying to tell us?
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ice (Score:2)
I'm not an expert, but if it were ice, wouldn't you expect to see it in a crater on the pole where it is permanently in the shadow, rather than on the equator ?
Ceres it's cold out there (Score:2)
The solar irradiance at Ceres is about 150 W/m2...1/9th that of earth. It is cold out there in the asteroid belt in comparison to the moon or Mercury where surface ice is exposed only in polar permanent shadow. As reference the moons of Jupiter have no trouble maintaining a coat of ice.
My guess is that the surface of Ceres is like a charred marshmallow; organic long chain hydrocarbon on top forming a dark crust that protects a frozen interior of H20/CO2/Methane and ammonia. The white spot is a rupture out o
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Aliens!!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
In fact I could even narrow the question down to how many sci-fi stories have we all read where the artefact involved Ceres?
So while if I had to bet I would go with ice, soil disturbance, tectonic, or maybe even something a little cool like magnetic. But I want aliens!
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Earthlings? (Score:2)
I've often wondered if we are the first species to achieve intelligence on Earth.
Bonobos are pretty smart, and a rough estimate might put them about 5 million years behind us on the evolutionary scale.
Taking that as a rough guide (no more rough than the Drake equation), suppose humans decided to leave the planet, and suppose Bonobos evolved to our level of technology. Would they find evidence of us?
Five million years is a pretty long time: everything on the surface would be eroded away, the seafloor would g
Re:Earthlings? (Score:5, Insightful)
Bonobos are pretty smart, and a rough estimate might put them about 5 million years behind us on the evolutionary scale.
They are not behind, they are right next to us on another path, and we have no way of telling where they'll go.
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On the surface of the planet, you would be very hard-pressed to find evidence of a civilization like ours that existed five million years ago. But start digging and you would find plenty of evidence. Things would get covered with sediment, and you would find things like roads, bricks, and other trash when you start digging. Some stuff we make would last a very long time, especially in the right environments. Glass, aluminum wheels and engine blocks, gold coins and jewelry, concrete, silicon chips, some
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Five million years is a pretty long time: everything on the surface would be eroded away, the seafloor would get covered in quite a bit of muck, any underground bunker would collapse. Overall I don't think there's be any reason for them to suspect that we were once here.
We have fossils from hundreds of millions years old, and they were made from fragile, organic, materials. If we leave enough stuff around, some of it will survive at least equally long.
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suppose humans decided to leave the planet
Some humans, sure. But as long as the planet remains habitable, ALL humans leaving seems rather improbable. Human populations tend to expand to cover all available ground, not move as a single herd from A to B.
Re:Earthlings? (Score:5, Insightful)
Bonobos just figured out that civilization is a lot of extra work to go through for fucking and eating. Especially when you can just fuck and eat without it.
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Overall I don't think there's be any reason for them to suspect that we were once here.
True but possibly because they may never make the leap now that all the easy fuel is used up. Wasn't there a story on here a few days ago about how difficult it would be to restart industry after a civilization collapse because there would be no infrastructure that can drill 10000ft underwater, etc? It took a lot more than 5M years under very different surface conditions for all that oil and coal to collect. The fact that we've burned as much fossil fuel as we did makes me think that there hasn't been a pri
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I suspect that Neanderthal level would simply have left little trace with any findings being self-supressed by the palaeontologist.
Even North American Indian culture of 500 years ago would still be largely invisible after 65 million years again with the aid of people dismissing the few oddities they found
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Would they find evidence of us?
Five million years is a pretty long time: everything on the surface would be eroded away, the seafloor would get covered in quite a bit of muck, any underground bunker would collapse. Overall I don't think there's be any reason for them to suspect that we were once here.
Have you never heard of Twinkies?
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"...suppose that some *other* species evolved into intelligence more than 5 million years ago and left. Would we see any evidence?"
Yes. Assuming they didn't try to hide their traces. If I remember right, full surface recycling takes more than 200M years.
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If it is aliens would they tell us? Or like most stories would there be a coverup?
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But for many they would suppress it for all kinds of paternalistic/relig
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> Having a diamond the size of Texas would certainly create a new space race
Diamonds are not a compelling reason to go to other planets. The difference in economic scale is staggering. Diamonds are an artificially constrained resource. De beers and friends have conspired to keep cheap artificial diamonds (not fake zirconium) out of the luxury market, somewhat successfully. This doesn't mean it's work spending billions of dollars to get more. We can manufacture them here, cheaper than going out into orbit
Re:Remnants of a forgotten planet (Score:4, Funny)
This doesn't mean it's work spending billions of dollars to get more. We can manufacture them here, cheaper than going out into orbit, much less another planet.
But these are SPACE DIAMONDS, and clearly far more likely to get you laid than those silly artificial diamonds.
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> Having a diamond the size of Texas would certainly create a new space race
Diamonds are not a compelling reason to go to other planets. The difference in economic scale is staggering. Diamonds are an artificially constrained resource. De beers and friends have conspired to keep cheap artificial diamonds (not fake zirconium) out of the luxury market, somewhat successfully. This doesn't mean it's work spending billions of dollars to get more. We can manufacture them here, cheaper than going out into orbit, much less another planet.
Just buy white sapphire. Looks just like a diamond unless you compare them side by side (and then only by color of the light or by hardness) and about a third of the price.
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It has been theorized, but entirely discredited. Another planet breaking up would have left a lot more debris behind than exists in the asteroid belt. There's not even enough there to make Mercury or the Moon, much less a gas giant. Even if there were some unknown cosmic vacuum cleaner that sucked up the majority of mass the missing planet would have left its signature on the orbital dynamics of the rest of the planets, and there's nothing.
Like that spot on a coconut... (Score:3)
Obvious... (Score:2)
Large, shiny reflective surfaces... it's a pair of Monoliths.
mark "would like to go there to investigate them...."
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Who the hell modded up this off-topic spam post?
"Three Leading Possibilities" (Score:5, Informative)
No need to click - the "three leading possibilities" are exactly what you guessed:
- Ice
- Dry Ice
- Different rocks that have a different albedo
If you only guessed "ice" and "different rocks" you still get full credit.
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- Different rocks that have a different albedo [wikipedia.org]
Some rocks want to get their rocks off more than others.
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No, they checked. In the video you can see it goes dim then black when it gets out of sunlight.
It was worth checking though.....
Need a rover (Score:2)
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Why would it be a better place ? It's further away, colder, and there's less gravity.
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HELIUM 3 (Score:1)
I know what they are... (Score:2)
Spaceballs spitballs.
Barf and Lonestar where messing around doing some target practice with the Spitball cannon... Don't worry, Mega-Maid will clean it up eventually.
Spectrograph? (Score:1)
Don't they have something similar to a spectrograph to determine chemical signature of selected targets? I thought such was standard equipment on such probes. Perhaps they are not yet close enough to Ceres to get useful data from it.
spectrograph overview: http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/p... [rit.edu]
Re:Spectrograph? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, they do, and no, they're not.