July 7: Ceres (Dwarf Planet)

Giuseppe Piazzi was born on 7 July 1746. He was an Italian monk and astronomer, the first to discover an asteroid (1801, Ceres). Here are 10 things you might not know about his most famous discovery.

1. Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It is about about 590 miles, or 950 kilometers, wide. It has a mass of 9.39×1020 kg. It makes up one-third the mass of the Asteroid belt, but is smaller than the Moon. It has enough mass to make it round in shape.
2. A day on Ceres is just 9 hours long, but a year lasts 4.6 Earth years. It is very cold with temperatures ranging from -225°F to -100°F.
3. Ceres was the first asteroid to be discovered, by Giuseppe Piazzi on January 1, 1801. He was investigating a mathematical prediction that there was a planet between Mars and Jupiter. At first, Ceres was classified as a planet, but as more and more asteroids were found, Ceres, like Pluto in our time, was demoted and deemed to be a mere asteroid. In 2006, when Pluto was demoted to dwarf planet, Ceres was promoted and was re-classified as a dwarf planet as well.
4. Piazzi, who lived in Sicily, wanted to call his discovery Cerere Ferdinandea after Ceres, the Roman goddess of the harvest and King Ferdinand of Sicily. Other nations rejected the Ferdinandea, so it became simply Ceres. The Germans called it Hera for a while, and in Greece, they call it Demeter after the equivalent goddess in the Greek pantheon. The astronomical symbol of Ceres is a sickle, which looks like the symbol for Venus but with a gap in the circle.
5. It has some odd surface features. In 2002 the Keck II telescope first noticed something unusual; and the space probe Dawn in 2015 beamed back pictures of two bright spots inside one of the craters. Speculation began as to what they might be - volcanoes, perhaps, but there were no mounds associated with them. Alien civilizations, then? Sadly, no. Scientists now think they are deposits of salt reflecting the light of the sun. Since then, more bright spots have been observed - there seem to be at least ten. One of the spots sometimes has a haze above it.
6. What else is there? Ceres has one prominent mountain, Ahuna Mons. There are a lot of craters, although they are relatively small. Quite a few of the craters have pits or peaks inside them which could be volcanic in origin. The Herschel Space Observatory recently spotted water vapour emanating from Ceres near to some of the bright spots. Scientists think this means there are icy volcanoes there, or possibly a meteor strike exposed ice under the surface. They also think Ceres has an ocean under its surface, but not an ocean as we know it - it would be a sea of salty mud slurry, so no alien giant squids swimming about in it - but it could support some kind of life.
7. Ceres is the only dwarf planet within the orbit of Neptune, and the nearest dwarf planet to Earth.
8. The NASA spacecraft Dawn has been in orbit around Ceres since 2015 and has made some fascinating discoveries. It has features similar to Mars, and also features similar to moons, comets and asteroids. Dawn also visited Vesta, and so is the first spacecraft to orbit two different bodies beyond Earth.
9. It is likely Ceres has a rocky core, an icy mantle, perhaps some subsurface liquid water and a dusty top layer.
10. In astrology, Ceres rules agriculture, food, nurturing of all living beings, motherhood, transitions in a woman's life and family relationships. Thanks to the myth of Ceres losing her daughter Persephone to Pluto for half the year, Ceres is also connected with separation, grief, time-sharing, crop failure and child abduction.

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