Starship Asterisk*

What's the spot on World Ceres?
NASA | JPL-Caltech | Dawn

I think the bright spots are the chemical Mercury.

its glass

Revealed reflective surface from recent meteor impact definitely seems to be the most feasible, but, I just realized something that very well may or may not have already been hypothesized, if not for pure outlandishness but then again that's why these exist; what would be the odds that Ceres is in fact the frozen core of a failed 5th terrestrial body in our Solar System?

The intense reflectivity of those spots seem so oddly out of place that in a video from this article:
http://www.cnet.com/news/dwarf-planet-c ... -approach/

- upon the spots revolution to the dark side, they don't really seem to dissipate in intensity until fully away from sun light. I can imaging the iron ore of a planet's core, frozen solid and completely blanketed in dust and residual "dirt" during the coagulation period for billions of years would offer a superbly brilliant reflection if ever exposed to sunlight. Just a thought! Either that or it's a Forerunner planet.

The bright spots are glass formed following meteorite impacts on the surface

Radioactive material of some type from impact with meteor?

Has anyone noticed the round empty holes that surround the bright spots. Enlarge the photo and you will see them. It's another mystery.

Diamond mountains

if you notice there are a few spots that light up as the "sphere" turns.... I believe its ice.

where we go when we die

It's exposed ground, regolith has been blasted away by a large mothership UFO taking off from the surface. I've talked to them and they confirm this answer.

I think it is ice.
Perhaps the reflection comes from a very smooth surface resulting from resolidification of molten water after a meteorite impact on the surface

GOLD!

CO2 most likely, possibly water from a small comet impact

Alien mining activities

Light pollution: Greenhouses

I think other asteroids are throwing snowballs at Ceres.

Wayne Jepson wrote:I suspect they may have more than one cause... recent impacts exposing fresh icy material from beneath a dusty surface is a likely cause for at least some of the bright spots. Others seem SO bright, it makes me suspect frost-covered areas around vents / geysers / ice volcanoes... and of course evidence of water vapor was observed last year, which would be consistent with these. Of course, development of longer term vents could be a response to meteor impacts?

Best one so far.

But coudn't anyone think on alien plants like the ones suggested by http://www.ted.com/talks/freeman_dyson_ ... lar_system

The bright areas along zones having the same sun angle appear to have different brightness.
This may mean the bright spots have different ages rather than different compositions.
Solar wind will probably cause all the spots to disappear after time to be replaced by other newer impacts.

I think they are left-over bits of the pulverized meteors that crashed into Ceres--much like when you throw a snowball at something and part of the snowball stays at the point of impact.

Neon - definitely lots of bright Neon light pollution.

I suspect they may have more than one cause... recent impacts exposing fresh icy material from beneath a dusty surface is a likely cause for at least some of the bright spots. Others seem SO bright, it makes me suspect frost-covered areas around vents / geysers / ice volcanoes... and of course evidence of water vapor was observed last year, which would be consistent with these. Of course, development of longer term vents could be a response to meteor impacts?

I think it is frozen CO2. Ceres is not that much further out in orbit than Mars, which has lots of frozen CO2 on its surface. Perhaps on Ceres, the CO2 does not sublimate much.

Monolith definitely!

Ice - perhaps an ice layer rather than ice lakes.

The asteroid belt, including Ceres, is the result of a big crash as a planet was trying to form. Another planet had formed between Jupiter and this one, I call it Illo. Then when the protoplanet between Illo and Mars (I call Smithereens) tried to form, it crashed into Illo...before it fully formed. This caused: material from the crash to fling out away from the crash site. Illo's broken ice layer was gravitationally trapped by Saturn forming its rings, other light gaseous debris covered Saturn's ice layer. Illo crashed into Jupiter, creating a dent in Jupiter's ice layer and depositing red sulfur debris in the dent and depositing other gaseous debris to cover Jupiter's ice layer before the remaining stripped planet became gravitationally trapped as Jupiter's moon Io. Smithereens did not get to fully compact (like other planets) prior to the crash, this accounts for the density of Comet 67P, and I predict that Ceres will have a similar density (plus or minus 15%).

When a protoplanet's atomic material compacts due to the changing magnetic field of the core when the protoplanet starts to spin (spin starts when the protoplanet exits the spiral/vortex of nebula material that is an early stage of solar-system development), there is a lot of heat that is generated. This causes methane and water vapor to rise from the surface. When it rises high enough it freezes in cold space (some of the vapor condenses on the surface after the ice layer is present). This is why Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, maybe Neptune and many moons have ice layers (Neptune is formed from very light atomic material and only has a little methane, possibly not enough for a robust ice layer). Mercury's ice layer melted, ice layers on Venus and Mars eroded due to solar winds since they had very weak or no magnetosphere, and the drama of what happened to Earth's ice layer is out of the scope of this post. So steam was generated when the atomic material of Smithereens started compacting - for the piece of Smithereens called Ceres, did the steam get to form a complete ice layer which is now under a bunch of dirt debris from the crash, or is the ice eroded by solar winds so that only spots (lakes) are present? We'll have to find out.