A closer look at the mysterious white spots on Ceres | The Compost Bin | Forums

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Scientists just got the first close-up look at some perplexing white spots in space, and they're more mystified than ever

Last March, NASA's Dawn spacecraft made history when it became the first mission to ever orbit a dwarf planet.

Before Dawn, the best images we had of the dwarf planet Ceres were taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in the early 2000s from a distance of 257 million miles away. And about the only thing these fuzzy photos were good for was to spark one of the most outstanding questions in astronomy today: What is that bright, white dot?

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Ever since Dawn began orbiting Ceres, it has been flying increasingly closer to the surface. That means every new image Dawn transmits to Earth is even more detailed and better than the last. And one of it's greatest contributions yet has been to show us that Ceres doesn't just have one spot: It has many!

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But that's nothing compared to the image that NASA just released today, June 10. Check out this incredible shot that Dawn took from 2,700 miles above Ceres' surface — 6,000 miles closer than the images shown above. This is the closest photo we have yet of the mysterious white spots on Ceres:

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