Ceres
The dwarf
planet Ceres, named after the Roman goddess of growing plants and motherly
love, lies in the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
Ceres is the largest object by far in the asteroid belt and contains about a
third of the belt's total mass. Ceres is massive enough that, unlike its
asteroid neighbors, gravity can pull it into a spherical shape. Dubbed a
planet when it was discovered at the beginning of the 19th century, Ceres
was subsequently considered an asteroid until 2006 when it was reclassified
as a dwarf planet.
Not a whole
lot is known about this dwarf planet as the best images obtained so far from
the Hubble Space Telescope show a sphere with some indistinct surface
features. Due to its distance from the Sun, Ceres may have a tenuous
atmosphere and frost.
In this
image I'm suggested that Ceres, like all small bodies in the Solar System,
is a rather sterile, lunar-like world pockmarked with hundreds of impact
craters.
|