They think they solved it..

What do you think are they right?  The unusual “dwarf planet” Ceres has been the topic of a lot of speculation in 2015.  There were some very bizarre bright spots that were spotted by Dawn this year.  The internet has been buzzin’ with notions of bioluminescent organisms to other theories behind these unexplainable anomolies.  However, now astronomers think they figured it out:

But now we’ve finally got our hands on the data from Dawn’s most recent fly-by, and separate teams of researchers have come up with a couple of fascinating insights: the bright material that gives these spots their distinctive shine looks to be some kind of icy salt, and it contains deposits of ammonia-rich clays, which hints at how Ceres formed.

Based on observations from Dawn’s framing camera, the researchers suspect that the salt-rich spots on Ceres formed back when water-ice sublimated below the surface thanks to asteroid impacts. “The simplest scenario is that the sublimation process of water ice starts after a mixture of ice and salt minerals is exposed by an impact, which penetrates the insulating dark upper crust,” the researchers write in their Nature paper.

It seems to make sense but who knows for sure.

Let’s check out some close ups in the video on page 2

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