Learn about dwarf planet Ceres

Ceres is the smallest dwarf planet known in the Solar System and is the only dwarf planet in the main asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars.

This dwarf planet was discovered by Giuseppe Piazzi on January 1, 1801 and named after the Greek goddess Ceres - the goddess of plants, crops and maternal love. For half a century it was said to be the 8th planet.

Ceres image taken from the ship Dawn on February 19, 2015.

With a diameter of about 950 km (590 mi), Ceres is the largest and heaviest object in the main belt, and accounts for 32% of the main belt volume. Recent observations have identified it as a spherical shape, unlike the irregular shape of smaller objects with weaker gravity. The surface of Ceres can be a mixture of water ice and various hydrate minerals such as carbonate and clay. Ceres exhibits a divergent expression of ice and mantle cores, which can have liquid water ocean beneath its surface.

From Earth, Ceres' apparent magnitude is about 6.7 to 9.3, and therefore it is still very dim at first sight with the naked eye. On September 27, 2007, NASA launched Dawn to explore Vesta (2011–2012) and Ceres (2015).

With a diameter of about 950km, Ceres is the largest and heaviest object in the asteroid belt, and contains about 1/3 of the total volume of the belt. Recent observations have shown that Ceres is spherical, unlike smaller bodies with irregular shapes.

Ceres trajectory.

Ceres' surface is probably composed of a mixture of ice and a variety of hydrated minerals such as carbonates and clay.

In January 2014, observations of the Herschel telescope of the European Space Agency showed that on the surface of Ceres there were signs of steam.

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