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The listed objects currently include most objects in the asteroid belt and moons of the giant planets in this size range, but many newly discovered objects in the outer Solar System are missing, such as those included in the following reference. [58]
Ceres (minor-planet designation: 1 Ceres) is a dwarf planet in the middle main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. It was the first known asteroid , discovered on 1 January 1801 by Giuseppe Piazzi at Palermo Astronomical Observatory in Sicily , and announced as a new planet .
For the purposes of this article, "asteroid" refers to minor planets out to the orbit of Neptune, and includes the dwarf planet Ceres, the Jupiter trojans and the centaurs, but not trans-Neptunian objects (objects in the Kuiper belt, scattered disc or inner Oort cloud). For a complete list of minor planets in numerical order, see List of minor ...
Ceres' shape is controlled mainly by gravity and spin, with only a 3% departure from hydrostatic equilibrium. Its best-fit shape is a triaxial ellipsoid with dimensions a = 483.1 km, b = 481.0, km and c = 445.9 km, with c being the north-south axis and a and b the semimajor and semiminor equatorial axes.
Among the other dwarf planets, Ceres has no known moons. It is 90 percent certain that Ceres has no moons larger than 1 km in size, assuming that they would have the same albedo as Ceres itself. [6] Eris has one large known moon, Dysnomia. Accurately determining its size is difficult: one indicative estimate of its radius is 350 ± 57.5 km. [7]
Indeed, the draft of Resolution 5A had called these median bodies planetoids, [32] [33] but the plenary session voted unanimously to change the name to dwarf planet. [2] The second resolution, 5B, defined dwarf planets as a subtype of planet, as Stern had originally intended, distinguished from the other eight that were to be called "classical ...
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The geology of the dwarf planet, Ceres, was largely unknown until Dawn spacecraft explored it in early 2015. However, certain surface features such as "Piazzi", named after the dwarf planets' discoverer, had been resolved.[a] Ceres's oblateness is consistent with a differentiated body, a rocky core overlain with an icy mantle.