The ghosts of nearly two dozen icy volcanoes haunt dwarf planet Ceres
Remains of eruptions suggest the world has been volcanically active for billions of years
Scientists have spotted the ghosts of nearly two dozen ice volcanoes on dwarf planet Ceres.
Found using topographic maps from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, the slumped remains of once-grand cones suggest that Ceres has experienced continual eruptions for billions of years, the researchers report September 17 in Nature Astronomy.
When Dawn arrived at Ceres in 2015, scientists noticed just one cryovolcano, which spews water instead of magma: Ahuna Mons, a four-kilometer-high mountain that formed at most 240 million years ago (SN Online: 9/1/16). At the time, researchers wondered why Ceres didn’t seem to have any other volcanoes.