The discovery of two bright lights on the dwarf planet Ceres has NASA scientists puzzled.

But with the US Dawn probe preparing to enter its orbit, the mystery may soon be resolved.

Two mysterious lights, filmed by NASA's Dawn space probe, appear on the surface of dwarf planet Ceres. Credit:AFP handout-NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt, which lies between Mars and Jupiter. The smallest dwarf planet in the solar sustem, it has a diameter of about 950 kilometres.

Images taken nearly 46,000 kilometres from Ceres show that a bright spot on the planet, which scientists discovered previously, appears next to another slightly darker spot, NASA said in a news release on Thursday.