3 mile tall Pyramid found on Ceres?

[Borgholio]

One billion years? I'm not sure. Mars was beginning to cool down already a billion years ago. Ceres is even smaller so I would think no.

[SpottedKitty]

Natural reactors like the ones discovered in Africa? Those were running about 1.5-2 billion years ago, but they're special cases — there's less than a handful of places on Earth where conditions were just right to allow it to happen. It's just barely possible, I suppose, that Ceres could provide another "just right" spot, but I really doubt it; the African ore concentrations could only have happened in a planet big enough to have an atmosphere and at least a little free oxygen.

Another showstopper; the African reactors were in solid rock, and the reaction byproducts haven't moved more than a few inches in two billion years. Ceres almost definitely has just a thin crust over deep ice, it's just too different.

There has been radiation-caused heating in Ceres' past, of course; there's an isotope of Aluminium that's the usual culprit in heating a newly formed planetoid. It's how they get internal structure; enough heat, and the heavier elements sink to the core while the lighter stuff floats on top. The same happened to the early Earth, although here the heating continues at a lower level right through to today — the Aluminium isotope decays to nearly nothing in less than a million years, but other isotopes are much longer-lived.

[madd0ct0r]

well, i was thinking a local hotspot on the core, driving an ice volcano. It can't be that likely to happen, or Cere's would be covered in pimples.

[SpottedKitty]

Precisely — I think we now have good images of just about the whole surface, so if anyone had noticed other peaks it would have been mentioned by now.