CERES INFO

Ceres, also designated 1 Ceres, is the smallest dwarf planet in the Solar System and the only one located in the main asteroid belt. Its name is derived from the Roman goddess Ceres, the goddess of growing plants, the harvest, and of motherly love. It was discovered on January 1, 1801, by Giuseppe Piazzi. With a diameter of about 950 km, Ceres is by far the largest and most massive body in the asteroid belt, and contains approximately a third of the belt's total mass. Recent observations have revealed that it is spherical, unlike the irregular shapes of smaller asteroids with less gravity.

Ceres' astronomical symbol is a sickle, (), similar to Venus' symbol () which is the female gender symbol and Venus' hand mirror.

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Discovery Info
Piazzi was searching for a star listed by Francis Wollaston as Mayer 87 because it was not in Mayer's zodiacal catalogue in the position given. Instead, Piazzi found a moving star-like object, which he thought at first was a comet. Piazzi observed Ceres a total of 24 times, the final time on February 11, when illness interrupted. On January 24, 1801, Piazzi announced his discovery in letters to fellow astronomers, among them his fellow countryman, Barnaba Oriani of Milan. He reported it as a comet but "since its movement is so slow and rather uniform, it has occurred to me several times that it might be something better than a comet". In April, Piazzi sent his complete observations to Oriani, Bode, and Lalande in Paris. Shortly thereafter, they were published in the September, 1801 issue of the Monatliche Correspondenz. To recover Ceres, Carl Friedrich Gauss, then only 24 years old, developed a method of orbit determination from three observations. In only a few weeks, he predicted its path, and sent his results to Franz Xaver, Baron von Zach, the editor of the Monatliche Correspondenz. On December 31, 1801, von Zach and Heinrich W. M. Olbers unambiguously confirmed the recovery of Ceres.

Status Info
The classification of Ceres has changed more than once. At the time of its discovery it was considered a planet; it was classified as an asteroid for over 150 years; and was first classified a dwarf planet in 2006. Johann Elert Bode believed Ceres to be the "missing planet" that Johann Daniel Titius had proposed to exist between Mars and Jupiter, at a distance of 419 million km (2.8 AU) from the Sun. Ceres was assigned a planetary symbol, and remained listed as a planet in astronomy books and tables (along with 2 Pallas, 3 Juno and 4 Vesta) for about half a century until further asteroids were discovered. However as further objects were discovered in the area it was realised that it represented the first of a class of many similar bodies. Sir William Herschel coined in 1802 the term asteroid ("star-like") for such bodies, writing, "they resemble small stars so much as hardly to be distinguished from them, even by very good telescopes". As the first such body to be discovered, it was given the designation 1 Ceres under the modern system of asteroid numbering.

Orbit Info
Orbit of CeresCeres follows an orbit between Mars and Jupiter, within the main asteroid belt, with a period of 4.6 years. The orbit is moderately inclined (i=10.6° to be compared with 7° for Mercury and 17° for Pluto) and moderately eccentric (e=0.08 to compare with 0.09 for Mars).



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