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The Dawn spacecraft has found evidence of magnesium sulphate (epsom salts) on Ceres, causing the mysterious bright spots:
The US space agency's Dawn satellite continues to return remarkable images from the dwarf planet Ceres. Now just 385km above the surface (lower than the space station is above Earth), the probe has revealed new features inside the mini-world's Occator Crater. This is the 92km-wide depression that has multiple bright spots of what are thought to be exposed salts.
[...] "The intricate geometry of the crater interior suggests geologic activity in the recent past, but we will need to complete detailed geologic mapping of the crater in order to test hypotheses for its formation." Scientists think the bright spots are deposits of epsom salts (magnesium sulphate), the trace remains of briny water-ice that at one time became exposed on the surface.
With no atmosphere on the dwarf planet, the water content would have rapidly vaporised, leaving only the magnesium sulphate spots. Ceres likely has quite a lot of buried water-ice. This idea is being investigated by the satellite's GRaND instrument, which senses neutrons and gamma rays produced by cosmic ray interactions with surface materials. It is a means to understand the chemistry of the top metre or so of Ceres' rocky "soil".
Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2016, @04:02AM
Hey, excuse me!! Ceres is not a planet!!! Despite its shape and the fact that it orbits the Sun, it's merely a dwarf planet [wikipedia.org]. It hasn't cleared its orbit of debris, like a real planet would. Let's not dilute the term "planet" by using it for anything spherical that goes around a star.
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Thursday March 24 2016, @05:26AM
Sorry, let's demote it to a dwarf planet then ;-)
The resources are still there regardless of this issue :p Though the asteroid belt seems like an ominous place to do things. Asteroid strikes are perhaps more likely to occur there?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2016, @12:42PM
Question;
is the asteroid belt going to stay an asteroid belt forever or will it form a planet Ceres? Has anyone modelled how long that would still take for Ceres to clear its orbit?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 25 2016, @03:34AM
I'm not from the IAU police; I just dropped in to give bitstream a bit of a ribbing.
Someone wrote in Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] that the asteroid belt is thought to have lost ~99.9% of its original mass as objects were displaced from it by Mars and Jupiter, while "there has been no significant increase or decrease in the typical dimensions of the main-belt asteroids." Someone there wrote that the hypothesis that the asteroids are the remnants of a smashed-up planet [wikipedia.org] has fallen out of favour. Pity, that.