Dwarf planet Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and it’s the only dwarf planet located in the inner solar system. It was the first member of the asteroid belt to be discovered when Giuseppe Piazzi spotted it in 1801.
Although it—and the next two asteroids discovered, Pallas and Juno—is located near the distance predicted by Bode’s law for the “missing” planet between Mars and Jupiter, most asteroids found subsequently are not so located, and so the agreement with that “law” appears to be coincidental.
Ceres’ shape and density are consistent with a two-layer model of a rocky core surrounded by a thick ice mantle. Ceres rotates once in 9.1 hours. Compositionally, the asteroid’s surface resembles the carbonaceous chondrite meteorites. Water vapour, the first detected in the asteroid belt, escapes into space when Ceres is closest to the Sun.
Ceres was designated a dwarf planet, a new category of solar system objects defined in August 2006 by the International Astronomical Union. (For a discussion of that decision, see planet.) The U.S. space probe Dawn studied the dwarf planet from March 2015 to November 2018. Dawn observed two very bright spots, Cerealia Facula and Vinalia Faculae, in Occator crater on Ceres.
Credit : Britannica
Picture Credit : Google
