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An unexpected mountain has been discovered on Ceres in images sent by NASA's Dawn orbiter:
One year ago, on March 6, 2015, NASA's Dawn spacecraft slid gently into orbit around Ceres, the largest body in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Since then, the spacecraft has delivered a wealth of images and other data that open an exciting new window to the previously unexplored dwarf planet.
"Ceres has defied our expectations and surprised us in many ways, thanks to a year's worth of data from Dawn. We are hard at work on the mysteries the spacecraft has presented to us," said Carol Raymond, deputy principal investigator for the mission, based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.
Among Ceres' most enigmatic features is a tall mountain the Dawn team named Ahuna Mons. This mountain appeared as a small, bright-sided bump on the surface as early as February 2015 from a distance of 29,000 miles (46,000 kilometers), before Dawn was captured into orbit. As Dawn circled Ceres at increasingly lower altitudes, the shape of this mysterious feature began to come into focus. From afar, Ahuna Mons looked to be pyramid-shaped, but upon closer inspection, it is best described as a dome with smooth, steep walls.
Dawn's latest images of Ahuna Mons, taken 120 times closer than in February 2015, reveal that this mountain has a lot of bright material on some of its slopes, and less on others. On its steepest side, it is about 3 miles (5 kilometers) high. The mountain has an average overall height of 2.5 miles (4 kilometers). It rises higher than Washington's Mount Rainier and California's Mount Whitney. Scientists are beginning to identify other features on Ceres that could be similar in nature to Ahuna Mons, but none is as tall and well-defined as this mountain.
"No one expected a mountain on Ceres, especially one like Ahuna Mons," said Chris Russell, Dawn's principal investigator at the University of California, Los Angeles. "We still do not have a satisfactory model to explain how it formed."
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 09 2016, @11:53PM
+3 Interesting!
But mention possibility of electrical deposition acting on this body and it's -1 Troll for you!
(Score: 2) by Zz9zZ on Thursday March 10 2016, @12:01AM
Can you provide a link to a similar claim? I know about electrical deposition for industrial purposes, never heard of it as an "out there" explanation for weird phenomena.
~Tilting at windmills~
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 10 2016, @07:02AM
Trust me, you do not want to know about the "electrical hypothesis". I mean, they laughed at Werner von Braun! They laughed at Einstein! They laughed at Jim Carey! So our completely insane theory about electricity (straight out the Nineteenth Century!!) creating craters and planets and such must be true!! Right? Hello? Guys?? You said there would be Snipe!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 10 2016, @04:09PM
I know about electrical deposition for industrial purposes, never heard of it as an "out there" explanation for weird phenomena.
What a shame. It's not your fault, the explanations and experimental evidence are actively ignored for some strange (unscientific) reason. Isn't it odd how "ancient aliens" will air on TV, but never the electrical hypothesis for crater formation.
A similar form as Razorback Canyons [nasa.gov] seen on Mars and have been created in the lab via electrostatic discharge. Electrostatic differential after a "carving" discharge causes its charged dust to repel from the crater/canyon and collect at the nearest point of the opposing charge (the crater walls). Nearly all celestial bodies have a statistically unexplainable set of craters within craters (bullseye craters, unlikely to have formed by successive impacts): When lightning strikes it is observed that the secondary and successive pulses along the same ionized path of the original strike creates a pit in the center. Domes in the center of craters are created by discharge going the other direction (deposition). All these phenomena are visible on Ceres, Mars, the Moon, and even Mar's Moons and other Asteroids (which aren't dirty snowballs but oddly shaped rocky bodies that seem to be fused somehow -- perhaps via plasma discharge).
The only theory of such events that is actually backed by experimental evidence is the electrical hypothesis: The sun emits hydrogen ions (protons), and this creates an electrical gradient in the solar system in approximate shape of the inverse square law (same distribution rules as light and other particles). Things further from the sun come barreling in from a more negatively charged environment into a more positively charged region of space, and we see arcing, glowing comet tails (similar phenomenon as the Aurora Borealis), and etc electrical events. Evidence of electrical "machining" is heavily prominent on Ceres, as it lacks the gravity to pull impacting bodies into alignment with itself, yet there are very few craters that are oblong -- The "strikes" overwhelmingly occur directly in line with the center of Ceres. Plasma discharges happen perpendicular to the surface they strike...
Mars. [youtube.com]
Ceres. [youtube.com] Hint: Those off-the-chart bright spots are electrical arcing, we've seen the same over-saturated bright spots on comets... which "inexplicably" glow in UV (which is produced by electrical phenomena).
Comets. [youtube.com]
Rosetta Mission [youtube.com]
It's a travesty, really. Tesla was right all along. How stupid would astronomers appear if they had to throw out most of their theories because they ignored the electical properties of our universe? The EM field is confirmed to be much stronger than gravity, and yet... they ignore electrical forces that work at interplanetary and cosmic scales. I'm hoping it's just hubris and not some more nefarious plot that keeps such things out of the public's mind.