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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.
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, at a third the estimated mass of the asteroid belt, is half again as massive as the next fifteen put together. The masses of asteroids are estimated from perturbations they induce on the orbits of other asteroids , except for asteroids that have been visited by spacecraft or have an observable moon, where a direct mass calculation is ...
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 a dwarf planet and the largest body in the asteroid belt. [19] As it is cryovolcanic, it has potential for asteroid mining of resources for colonization. Its gravitational pull is stronger than other bodies in the asteroid belt, making surface colonization a more realistic possibility. [citation needed]
Dawn is the first mission to study a dwarf planet, arriving at Ceres a few months before the arrival of the New Horizons probe at Pluto in July 2015. Dawn image of Ceres from 13,600 km, May 4, 2015. Ceres comprises a third of the total mass of the asteroid belt.
Ceres, which has a significant amount of ice in its composition, is the only accepted dwarf planet in the asteroid belt, though there are unexplained anomalies. [ 10 ] 4 Vesta , the second-most-massive asteroid and one that is basaltic in composition, appears to have a fully differentiated interior and was therefore in equilibrium at some point ...
Examples are Ceres in the asteroid belt and Pluto in the Kuiper belt. [46] Dynamicists usually prefer using gravitational dominance as the threshold for planethood, because from their perspective smaller bodies are better grouped with their neighbours, e.g. Ceres as simply a large asteroid and Pluto as a large Kuiper belt object.