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“What the Hell is That?” A History of Weird Planetary Features

The brights spots on Ceres are only the latest anomalies served up by our thoroughly weird solar system.
​Two bright spots on Ceres. Image: NASA/JPL.

On Wednesday, NASA released a puzzling c​lose-up shot of the dwarf planet Ceres taken by the Dawn spacecraft from a distance of about 29,000 miles. Two conspicuously bright spots sparkle on the tiny world's cratered surface, a development that has the scientific community flummoxed.

A gif of Ceres. Image:

NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/​IDA/PSI

"The brightest spot continues to be too small to resolve with our camera, but despite its size it is brighter than anything else on Ceres," said Andreas Nathues, a planetary scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, in a NASA statem​ent. "This is truly unexpected and still a mystery to us."

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At the moment, the most likely candidate is that reflective ice fie​lds or salt patches are the source of the light. But until Dawn gets a closer look, we can't rule out the possibility that the spots are actually floodlights illuminating some alien sporting event, or that Ceres has been singled out for some kind of special cosmic bedazzlement.

That said, this isn't the first time stargazers have been taken aback by odd or unexpected planetary features of other worlds.

The notion of a man in the Moon, for example, rose from an ancient stopgap explanation of the Moon's asymmetrical surface contours. In fact, many different cultures have their own anthropomorphic twist on lunar topology, from the Jade Ra​bbit of Chinese mythology to the cross-cultural myth of a giant​ moon toad.

One interpretation of the Man in the Moon. Credit: ​Luc Viatour/ www.Lucnix.be/Weeneldo​

Similar assumptions were made about Earth's two closest planetary neighbors, Venus and Mars. Venus's thick, reflective cloud cover makes it the third brightest object in the sky after the Sun and the Moon, and many ancient cultures took this luminosity to be indicative of a heavenly, fertile ​world. But as the Soviet Venera program revealed, Venus is a death trap of nightmarish proportions—a hellish, acid-soaked world.

Hopes that Mars might also host intelligent life were also eventually dashed, but at least the bait-and-switch wasn't quite so brutal for fans of the Red Planet.

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When telescopes became strong enough to resolve Martian surface features in the late 19th century, observations sparked a famous debate about Mars's alleged system of massive artificial canals, maintained and operated by an alien civilization. Despite fervent popular support for this theory, it was ultimately proved wrong.

Percival Lowell's maps of Martian canals. Image: ​Percival​ Lowell

But the cool thing is that Mars genuinely​ does sport ancient waterways, which have long since run dry. They were shaped by nature, not industry, but they still raise tantalizing questions about the planet's past, especially its capacity to have once supported life.

It's also worth mentioning that newly discovered Martian features still perplex scientists even today—like the time a rock seemingly appeared ou​t of nowhere in front of the Opportunity rover, or the massive physics-​defying cloud that turned up on during a Martian sunrise. Mars definitely still has some surprises up its proverbial sleeve.

The Martian self-materializing rock. Image: ​Mars Exploration Rover Mission, Cornell, JPL, NASA

In fact, so do most of the worlds in our solar system. For example, Saturn's moon Titan has only gotten weirder the more it's been explored, and is home to magically disappearing and reappearing ​islands and dunes that make no​ sense. The Galilean satellite Europa is decked out with cryovolcanoes and skeletal ice fractures formed by a subsurface ocean. And the asteroid that whizzed by Earth a few weeks ago ​had its very own moo​n.

Point being: the bright spots of Ceres are only the latest in a long line of curious anomalies discovered on planetary surfaces. But though the mystery may be solved by the time Dawn goes into orbit around Ceres next week, it is not likely to be the last.