Since the first sighting of the first-discovered and largest asteroid in our solar system was made in 1801 by Giuseppe Piazzi, astronomers and planetary scientists have pondered the make-up of this ...

Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, has long been cast as a frozen relic of the early solar system — quiet, airless, and lifeless. But new research suggests that ...

Scientists with NASA’s Dawn mission have identified permanently shadowed regions on the dwarf planet Ceres. Most of these areas likely have been cold enough to trap water ice for a billion years, ...

Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, has long perplexed planetary scientists. Once considered a planet, then an asteroid, and now officially classified as a dwarf ...

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 ...

New NASA research hints that Ceres — the closest dwarf planet to Earth — may have once had an ancient "power source" that could have sparked the evolution of extraterrestrial life-forms in the tiny ...

The dwarf planet 1 Ceres (magnitude 7.6) will be observable in proximity to the 5th-magnitude star Phi2 Ceti, positioned 10’ southeast on the initial evening and 10’ southwest the subsequent night, ...

In the tens of thousands of photos returned by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, the interior of Ceres isn’t visible. But scientists have powerful data to study Ceres’ inner structure: Dawn’s own motion. Since ...

A crater-rich dwarf planet named Ceres located in the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter was long thought to be composed of a materials mixture not dominated by water ice.

The scars on Ceres should have softened by now. That was the long-running problem. If the dwarf planet’s crust held a great deal of ice, many of its craters should have slowly sagged over geologic ...