We expected to be surprised by Ceres. We did not expect to be this puzzled.” – Chris Russell, principal investigator of NASA’s Dawn mission.

In 2007, NASA launched the Dawn Spacecraft. Its mission was to study the largest dwarf planets in the asteroid belt: Vesta and Ceres. Named after Roman goddesses, the two planetoids would provide valuable information about the birth of our solar system.

By late 2012, Dawn had accomplished its 14-month survey mission in Vesta’s orbit and was already en route to Ceres. With a diameter of 590 miles (950 kilometers), Ceres is the only object in the asteroid belt that is massive enough to be shaped into a sphere by its own gravity. Observations from the Keck and Hubble telescopes suggested ice was present on its surface, leading some scientists to speculate it might even have underground liquid oceans.

Since last December, Dawn has been sending back images of increasingly higher resolution. According to a statement NASA made last Friday, some of these images show two mysterious bright spots that currently remain unexplained.
Bright spots have been detected on Ceres before but they appeared as large light-colored areas whereas the lights captured by Dawn appear as small objects much brighter than the surrounding area.

As dawn has come closer to Ceres, the bright spots have become brighter and smaller. Indeed, they are much brighter than the surrounding landscape and still unresolved in our images. The point of origin must be very small,” said Russell.

First spotted from a distance of 51,500 miles (83,000 kilometers), the lights will perhaps reveal clues about their cause once Dawn draws nearer. We’ve got a few speculations on which to rest until that happens.

One possible explanation is that the lights were caused by the eruptions of ice volcanoes. This would suggest that there is seismic activity within the underground ice layer and perhaps even bodies of water.
Another hypothesis suggests that impacts with objects from the asteroid belt could cause cracks that expose the ice underneath.

However, this theory has its own crack: ice reflects almost 100 percent of the light it receives, while the two spots only reflect about 40%.
The lights could also be caused by silicates, a type of minerals that have been found on asteroids before.

And then we have another, far more speculative theory. Care to guess?

source: http://locklip.com/