Even with a new, detailed map of Ceres, scientists are still unable to explain the mysterious bright spots on the dwarf planet's surface.
According to BBC News, the new map comes from the Dawn spacecraft that is currently orbiting Ceres at an altitude of 915 miles. Dawn has been exhaustively imaging the dwarf planet's surface in cycles lasting 11 days.
"Ceres continues to amaze, yet puzzle us, as we examine our multitude of images, spectra and now energetic particle bursts," Chris Russell, Dawn principal investigator at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in a press release.
Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and is also one of the largest minor planets within the orbit of Neptune.
"The irregular shapes of craters on Ceres are especially interesting, resembling craters we see on Saturn's icy moon Rhea," Carol Raymond, Dawn's deputy principal investigator based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., said in the release. "They are very different from the bowl-shaped craters on Vesta."
Also confusing mission managers is a solitary four-mile high summit called the "Lonely Mountain."
"We're having difficulty understanding what made that mountain and we have been getting many suggestions from the public," Russell told reporters at a news conference, according to Discovery News. "These ice structures started just poking out (of the ground). Each one of them had a rock or something like that protecting the surface, keeping it cool," Russell said in describing the ice.
"Maybe our lonely mountain was some sort of ice construct," he said. "We're taking suggestions like this very seriously."
