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Planetary science

Unrelaxed craters muddy the waters of the dwarf planet Ceres

Ceres’s surface is ice-rich and warm, so we expect craters to viscously flow. Yet most of Ceres’s craters are not shallow. A new model that includes a stronger, progressively dirtier icy crust, frozen from an ancient ocean, may reconcile this discrepancy.

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Fig. 1

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

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Correspondence to Lauren Schurmeier.

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Schurmeier, L., Dombard, A.J. Unrelaxed craters muddy the waters of the dwarf planet Ceres. Nat Astron (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-024-02316-6

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