Ok first the white spots now this. I know its just a quirk of the landscape but still as flat as the rest of the planet is that mountain sticks out like a sore thumb.
CNN)OK, this is just too much.
First, NASA's Dawn probe spotted curiously sparkly bright spots on the surface of Ceres, the dwarf planet that lies in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Beats us, the scientists said.
Now, cameras on the tractor-trailer-size spacecraft have captured a baffling structure rising 3 miles above the planet's cratered surface.
Conveniently, the thing looks an awful lot like a pyramid.
"Intriguing," the NASA scientists said.
NASA chief scientists: 'Indications' of alien life by 2025
ALIENS! the #itsaliens crowd roared.
The new image, released Sunday by NASA, was taken June 14 from a distance of about 2,700 miles, the agency said.
It shows what NASA described in its classically understated and totally non-freaked-out tones as "a mountain with steep slopes protruding from a relatively smooth area of the dwarf planet's surface."
Spacecraft becomes first to orbit mysterious dwarf planet Ceres
Dawn: Mission to the beginning of the solar system
Dawn: Mission to the beginning of the solar system 16 photos
EXPAND GALLERY
To be fair, the agency offered no suggestion that the towering structure is an offering to some long-lost space emperor or home to our new alien overlords.
And, to be even more fair, it's probably just a really tall mountain in a solar system filled with wondrous and strange natural phenomena.
But the Dawn mission has done nothing but stoke imaginations since the discovery of mysterious bright spots on the surface of the dwarf planet in February and the beginning of the probe's orbit in March.
Folks have claimed to have spotted giant alien motherships hovering over the planet, bat-winged spaceships parked on its surface and even evidence of alien cities.
But the mystery only deepened with the most recent batch of images showing even more bright spots alongside the largest one, which NASA said looks to stretch some 6 miles.
Many, of course, insist that the spots look for all the world like brightly lit cities twinkling on the shadowed surface of the distant dwarf planet.
Of course, NASA hasn't traveled down that road. Scientists, they say, still don't know what the spots are. Maybe ice. Maybe salt.
"But scientists are considering other options, too," NASA said coyly.
looks like a cone that'd form naturally using any gravel/sand/non-cohesive dust and weak gravity.
"Aid, trade, green technology and peace." - Hans Rosling.
"Welcome to SDN, where we can't see the forest because walking into trees repeatedly feels good, bro." - Mr Coffee
That's assuming that it is actually the size and shape it appears to be in that photograph and not just an optical illusion. Remember the stone face of Mars?
Big icy comet, rock fragments glued together by ice, slowly melted away.
"Aid, trade, green technology and peace." - Hans Rosling.
"Welcome to SDN, where we can't see the forest because walking into trees repeatedly feels good, bro." - Mr Coffee
My wife and I drive through the Owens Valley almost every year and past several extinct cinder cones. Some are rather large and in the middle of a very flat plain.
Edit - here's a good aerial view. If it weren't for the rim of the valley right there, it would be similar to what we see on Ceres.
madd0ct0r wrote:Big icy comet, rock fragments glued together by ice, slowly melted away.
If said comet had collided with Ceres its remains would not have remained in a single mass. They would have been scattered over a wide area in and around a crater.
Borgholio wrote:Extinct volcano?
Three miles tall? On Ceres? If so, I'm impressed- and this is a matter of great interest.
Granted that Ceres has low enough gravity that heaping up a tall mountain is easy, but correspondingly it's so small that I wouldn't expect intense volcanism...
Three miles tall? On Ceres? If so, I'm impressed- and this is a matter of great interest.
Granted that Ceres has low enough gravity that heaping up a tall mountain is easy, but correspondingly it's so small that I wouldn't expect intense volcanism...
Well Olympus Mons on Mars is *13* miles high and nearly as big as France. So having a massive volcano on a (relatively) small planet is not unheard of.
Mars volume is about 360 times that of Ceres. 163,115,609,799 cubic km compared to 452,331,448 km3
Also Mons Olympus is the result of thousands of basaltic lava flows from when the core of the planet was active.
Ceres has a rocky core overlain with an icy mantle. The 100-kilometer-thick mantle (23%–28% of Ceres by mass; 50% by volume)[60] contains 200 million cubic kilometers of water, which is more than the amount of fresh water on Earth.
Don't you need, you know, molten core and tectonic activity for volcanoes of any kind to even exist...?
Sure. Ceres is big enough that at one point it could have had that. Right now it's probably frozen solid but who knows how long that peak has been there.
Don't you need, you know, molten core and tectonic activity for volcanoes of any kind to even exist...?
Not as unlikely as it might seem at first thought — something the size of Ceres might have been big enough for proper melting and the beginnings of internal structure when it was first formed. The main problem with that idea, though, is that this is (so far, I think) the only big pointy thing we've spotted, and the rest of the surface looks like it's been lightly abraded and smoothed down. Really old surfaces that haven't been overlaid with molten material tend to be heavily cratered; look at Mercury, and some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Ceres does have quite a few craters, but most in the photo above are tiny, and I don't think we've seen any really big sharply defined ones yet. This suggests the surface isn't all that old, and something (possibly subsurface icy slush) is slowly smoothing it out. My best guess? Whatever the "pyramid" is, it's recent — maybe even under a billion years old.
Yes, that counts as "recent".
“Despite rumor, Death isn't cruel — merely terribly, terribly good at his job.”
Terry Pratchett, Sourcery
Simon_Jester wrote:How would the slush go about smoothing a surface that appears to be made of rock?
Oh, the surface is rock, all right, but it might not be all that thick. If the bits-that-came-together-to-make-Ceres heated enough to separate out as they were forming, then there's likely a good solid rocky core in the middle with a thick ice mantle over it, topped with a thin rock crust. This could be why the tiny craters in the pic above are much sharper than the flattened-out medium and big ones; if a crater is too small to punch through to the ice under the crust, it won't slump. Look at the Wiki page on Ceres; the section on internal structure has a best-guess diagram of what's probably under the surface.
“Despite rumor, Death isn't cruel — merely terribly, terribly good at his job.”
Terry Pratchett, Sourcery
Although in that case, you still have the observation that a large comet (enough to leave a 'tailings pile' of rock and dust three miles high) would surely hit hard enough that its remains would be scattered widely... and it'd leave a big crater.
<nod> If the "pyramid" was made by some other object hitting Ceres, it would definitely leave a big crater. There are faint traces of a crater around it, but they're off-centre and much too small to have a central peak that size — they're unrelated, and the peak seems to have come up from below, probably long after the crater formed. I'm leaning towards some recent-ish geological process no-one expected Ceres to be capable of, but I'm not confident enough of that to put money on it.
Yet.
“Despite rumor, Death isn't cruel — merely terribly, terribly good at his job.”
Terry Pratchett, Sourcery
Billion years - does that put it far enough back for natural fission reactor?
"Aid, trade, green technology and peace." - Hans Rosling.
"Welcome to SDN, where we can't see the forest because walking into trees repeatedly feels good, bro." - Mr Coffee
