Those intriguing bright spots on the dwarf planet Ceres that have piqued the imagination of scientists might well turn out to be ice volcanoes or "cryovolcanoes".

Scientists believe these ice volcanoes, like their counterparts on Saturn's icy moons Enceladus and Titan, hurl water vapor into space. The Ceres cryovolcanoes raise the possibility a life-giving ocean exists beneath the surface of the dwarf planet.

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But there's another explanation for these bright surface spots. They could be plumes caused by sun-warmed icy patches, an effect seen in the tails of comets.

Scientists will know for certain what the answer is after mid-April when NASA's Dawn spacecraft now orbiting Ceres emerges from the dark side of the dwarf planet

Ceres or 1 Ceres, its minor-planet designation, is the largest object in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. With a diameter of 950 kilometers, Ceres consists of rock and ice and accounts for one third of the mass of the asteroid belt.

It's the only dwarf planet in the inner Solar System and the only object in the asteroid belt known to be unambiguously rounded by its own gravity. Ceres was the first asteroid to be discovered on January 1, 1801 by Giuseppe Piazzi in Palermo.

The first definitive detection of water vapor on Ceres was made in January 2014 by the Herschel space observatory. In 2005, images from the Hubble space telescope suggested the possibility of water ice.

The mysterious bright spots are inside a crater in black-and-white images received from Dawn mid-February. During one full, nine-hour rotation, Dawn showed the brighter of the two spots could be seen even from the side, indicating it extends beyond the crater's apparent boundaries.

NASA's Dawn spacecraft went into orbit around Ceres on March 6. Dawn was launched in September 2007 with the mission of studying two of the three known protoplanets in the asteroid belt: Vesta and Ceres. It's the first spacecraft to orbit two extraterrestrial bodies and is also the first spacecraft powered by an ion engine.