The International Astronomical Union (IAU) currently recognizes five dwarf planets in our solar system, though there are likely many more. The most famous of the bunch is Pluto, way out beyond the ...

How do you build a planet, let alone one capable of sustaining and evolving life? The clues to the “recipe” can perhaps be found in the leftovers scattered around our solar system. Things like ...

When NASA’s Dawn spacecraft arrived at Ceres, scientists expected to find a cold, inactive relic of the early solar system. Instead, they were confronted with bright white patches, strange mountains, ...

On January 1, 1801, a Sicilian astronomer named Giuseppe Piazzi discovered the dwarf planet Ceres orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter. At the time, Ceres was considered to be a planet. But after ...

Ceres is a dwarf planet and the largest known object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. And now we know it may be an ocean world with intriguing geologic activity taking place on and just ...

Astronomers have long been intrigued by the makeup of the asteroid belt’s largest body. When it was first spotted in 1801, Ceres appeared dry and rocky, its surface marked by craters and dents. For ...

Between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter lies a ring-shaped region called the asteroid belt, home to the vast majority of our solar system’s space rocks. The asteroid belt is as old as the solar system ...