Star Trek supposes that in the future, we will go out in space ships and look for other life forms. More likely, as depicted in one of the greatest sci-fi books ever written and turned into a movie, "2001 A Space Odyssey" what advanced civilizations are more likely to do is to pick a moon near a life supporting planet, preferably one that is tidally locked, and hide instruments on the rear facing side to the planet that can monitor the world for life and communicate back data. That is what the monolith is in 2001. So, what is this? http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/20/us/gallery/dawn-mission/index.html
What about the possibility of an asteroid or something similar that recently crashed into it, creating bright colored blobs of super hot material at impact?
I would think that if an alien intelligence put something on Ceres like you suggest, they would not use reflective or brightly luminescent material. It's more likely the reflection of ice, as is suggested.
Right, Sci-Fi aside, something along these lines is the most likely explanation. But it is fun to think otherwise
I am not so certain. What if their consensus for contact was that a species was able to travel to a totally inhospitable moon and photograph an object from high orbit? Also, I can come up with a dozen events that could have made a hidden object visible, especially if it had been hidden for many hundred, thousands, millions of years? Almost certainly, this is some sort of naturally occurring event. I just think it is fun to speculate.
So along those speculative theories, in order to violate their version of the Prime Directive, a species would have to see the sign they wrote on a moon of another planet in the same system? If they had a sense of humor, they would have constructed a building with a bright neon arrow sign saying "Eat At Joes". Can you imagine the look on the scientist that first saw that photo?
"(CNN)OK, this is just too much. First, NASA's Dawn probe spotted curiously sparkly bright spots on the surface of Ceres, the dwarf planet that lies in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Beats us, the scientists said. Now, cameras on the tractor-trailer-size spacecraft have captured a baffling structure rising 3 miles above the planet's cratered surface. Conveniently, the thing looks an awful lot like a pyramid." http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/23/us/feat-ceres-pyramid/index.html