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By far the largest object within the belt is the dwarf planet Ceres. The total mass of the asteroid belt is significantly less than Pluto's, and roughly twice that of Pluto's moon Charon. The asteroid belt is a torus-shaped region in the Solar System, centered on the Sun and roughly spanning the space between the orbits of the planets Jupiter ...
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 .
At a diameter of 964 km, Ceres is the largest object in the main asteroid belt and comprises about one-third of the belt's total mass. Ceres possesses sufficient gravity to form a rounded, ellipsoid shape, suggesting that it is close to being in hydrostatic equilibrium [6] —one of the conditions for defining a dwarf planet according to the ...
Ceres is saturated with impact craters.Many have a central pit or bright spot. In the first batch of 17 names approved by the IAU, craters north of 20° north latitude had names beginning with A–G (with Asari being the furthest north), those between 20° north and south latitude beginning with H–R, and those further south beginning with S–Z (with Zadeni being the furthest south).
The vast majority of minor planets are evenly distributed between the inner-, central and outer parts of the asteroid belt, which are separated by the two Kirkwood gaps at 2.5 and 2.82 AU. Nearly 97.5% of all minor planets are main-belt asteroids (MBA), while Jupiter trojans , Mars-crossing and near-Earth asteroids each account for less than 1% ...
An asteroid streaked past northern Siberia in the middle of the night Tuesday before burning up in Earth's atmosphere, lighting up the skies with a blinding flash, dramatic video shows.
The asteroid and comet belts orbit the Sun from the inner rocky planets into outer parts of the Solar System, interstellar space. [ 16 ] [ 17 ] [ 18 ] An astronomical unit , or AU, is the distance from Earth to the Sun, which is approximately 150 billion meters (93 million miles). [ 19 ]
In the moments before NASA's DART spacecraft slammed into the asteroid Dimorphos in a landmark planetary defense test in 2022, it took high-resolution images of this small celestial object and its ...