Bright patches on Ceres are plumes of water, maybe

Two bright spots on the dwarf planet Ceres might be plumes of water vapor, not patches of ice as is commonly suspected. The spots appear in images from the Dawn spacecraft even when the crater floor does not, suggesting they rise above the crater rim, Andreas Nathues of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research reported March 17 at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference at The Woodlands, Texas.

Natheus spoke during a session appropriately titled, “Your last chance to talk about Ceres before Dawn data wreck your theories.” Dawn will exit Ceres’ shadow in late April and begin mapping the dwarf planet — at which point planetary scientists will likely have a whole new batch of ideas to argue about.