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Dwarf Planet Ceres
 

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.

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