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Planetary science

Salty Ceres

A Correction to this article was published on 29 July 2016

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Anomalously bright spots are seen on the dark cratered surface of the dwarf planet Ceres. The Dawn spacecraft's detection of sodium carbonates in bright areas is consistent with aqueous activity in an ice-poor and salty regolith.

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Figure 1: Bright spots in the centre of Occator crater (inset) on Ceres.

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

Change history

  • 08 July 2016

    In the version of this News and Views originally published, the word 'hydration' in the sentence beginning 'However, only a few percent ice by volume...' should have been 'dehydration'. This has been corrected in the online versions of the News and Views 8 July 2016.

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Correspondence to Mikhail Zolotov.

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Zolotov, M. Salty Ceres. Nature Geosci 9, 476–477 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2756

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