At a Glance

Recent hydrothermal activity may explain Cere's brightest area, NASA reports.New evidence of also find ammonia-bearing salts on the dwarf planet.

Two new scientific papers are offering new insights on the mystery of the bright spots on Ceres, the dwarf planet that NASA’s Dawn Spacecraft has been orbiting and analyzing since last spring.

According to Space.com, for more than two centuries after its 1801 discovery. One of its more elusive mysteries is the famous bright spots on Ceres that intrigued scientists and the public alike when NASA discovered them in March 2015. The mystery of what these spots could be even inspired NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Californi, to create a —volcanoes, geysers, rocks, ice, salt deposits or somthing else.

In December 2015, two studies released in the journal Nature offered as to what the bright spots located in the mysterious Occator Crater could be. Dawn identified more than 130 bright areas that seem to be mostly associated with impact craters. Inside these craters appeared to be a type of salt (magnesium sulfate) called hexahydrite.

Evidence of Water on Ceres

The study published Wednesday in claims the bright spots on Ceres has the highest concentration of carbonate mineralsever seen outside Earth, according to a NASA press release.

"This is the first time we see this kind of material elsewhere in the solar system in such a large amount," said Maria Cristina De Sanctis, lead author and principal investigator of Dawn's visible and infrared mapping spectrometer.

De Sanctis' study finds that the dominant mineral of this bright area is sodium carbonate, a kind of salt found on Earth in hydrothermal environments. The theory is that the salt was unearthed when asteroids hit the surface, which may have helped bring this material up from below.

Results further suggest that liquid water may have existed beneath the surface of Ceres in recent geological time. The salts could be remnants of an ocean, or localized bodies of water, that reached the surface and then froze millions of years ago — a fact that intrigues scientists even further and makes Ceres ripe for the study of astrobiology.

"The minerals we have found at the Occator central bright area require alteration by water," De Sanctis said. "Carbonates support the idea that Ceres had interior hydrothermal activity, which pushed these materials to the surface within Occator."

Evidence for carbonate minerals also has been found on Mars, which similarly supports the theory that the . Sodium carbonate has also been discovered in an icy geyser erupting from Saturn’s moon Enceladus. However, the conclusions of De Sanctis and her colleagues indicate that the Ceres has the other heavenly bodies beat.

“The amounts [of carbonates] we are seeing on Ceres are much higher than any other deposits in the solar system beside Earth,” she said.

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Acccording to NASA's press release, "the spacecraft's visible and infrared mapping spectrometer examines how various wavelengths of sunlight are reflected by the surface of Ceres. This allows scientists to identify minerals that are likely producing those signals. The new results come from the infrared mapping component, which examines Ceres in wavelengths of light too long for the eye to see."

Bridging the Inner and Outer Solar System

The lastest research also detected ammonia-bearing salts, which DeSanctis says "reinforces Ceres' connection with icy worlds in the outer solar system."

"We will need to research whether Ceres' many other bright areas also contain these carbonates," said De Sanctis, who is based at the National Institute of Astrophysics in Rome.

by scientists with the Dawn framing camera team theorized that the bright areas contain a different kind of salt: magnesium sulfate. However, the newer findings suggest sodium carbonate is the more likely constituent.

"It's amazing how much we have been able to learn about Ceres' interior from Dawn's observations of chemical and geophysical properties. We expect more such discoveries as we mine this treasure trove of data," said Carol Raymond, deputy principal investigator for the Dawn mission, based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.

Dawn science team members have also published a new study about the makeup of the outer layer of Ceres in , based on images from Dawn's framing camera.

Led by Michael Bland of the U.S. Geological Survey, Flagstaff, Arizona, the study found that the majority of Ceres' largest craters are more than 1 mile deep relative to surrounding terrain, meaning they have remained the same over billions of years with little to no deformation. Although scientists expected that Ceres would be relatively ice-rich, the depths of the craters instead suggest that "Ceres' subsurface is no more than 40 percent ice by volume," and the rest a possible "mixture of rock and low-density materials such as salts or chemical compounds called clathrates."

The , one that has implications for life on Earth and beyond: the origin of water in our solar system," according to Gizmodo.

“Understanding water on Ceres—how much it has, how it attained and retained it, whether it formed in the asteroid belt or further out—has really important implications for the formation of the solar system overall,” Bland said. “I think Ceres is a great target for Dawn and future missions, as a way to bridge the inner and outer solar system.”

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