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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 ...
This list includes few examples since there are about 589 asteroids in the asteroid belt with a measured radius between 20 and 49 km. [171] Many thousands of objects of this size range have yet to be discovered in the trans-Neptunian region.
First near-Earth asteroid discovered and the second largest; first asteroid to be detected by radar; first asteroid orbited and landed upon 482 Petrina: 23.3: March 3, 1902: First asteroid named after dog 490 Veritas: 115: September 3, 1902: Created in one of the largest asteroid-on-asteroid collisions of the past 100 million years 588 Achilles ...
For comparison, the average distance between the Earth and the moon is about 385,000km (239,000 miles). So far, about 25,000 large asteroids have been discovered as potential “city killers”.
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A small asteroid will be pulled into orbit around the Earth as a “mini-moon” later this month before the space rock departs into other parts of the solar system.. The 10m-wide asteroid, dubbed ...