Planets: The Fascinating World Of Ceres
Uncover the interesting facts about Ceres. Dive deep into this rocky world.
As one of the dwarf planets, in our solar system, Ceres is the only dwarf planet that is located in the inner solar system. It’s also the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Scientists called it an asteroid for years before finally in 2006 scientist classified it as a dwarf planet; it was much larger and much more different than its neighbours. Therefore this makes many interesting, intriguing, fascinating facts about this dwarf planet.
Ceres is actually one of the few places that scientists would like to search for possible signs of life. As one of the planets that have water, this would make a brilliant place for life to appear. Here on Earth, the way we live life water is essential if we didn’t have any then there would be no way at all that we are able to live. If Ceres has a few other conditions, then it would be like an secondary Earth but a lot smaller. Life may currently live on Ceres and if it doesn’t then it may have held life before.
With a radius of 296 miles (476 kilometres), Ceres is around 13 times smaller than Earth. If Earth was a nickel, Ceres would be a poppy seed. Ceres has an average distance of 257 million miles (476 million kilometres) distance from the Sun. It takes 22 minutes for sunlight to reach this dwarf planet, which is almost 3 times longer than for Earth. It takes 8 minutes for the sunlight to reach Earth.
On Ceres, it takes 1,682 Earth days, or 4.6 Earth years, for Ceres to orbit around the Sun once (which is a year). It only takes 9 hours for Ceres to do one complete rotation on its axis (a day), which is one of the shortest in our solar system. Unlike Earth, Ceres is barely rotated it is only tilted by just 4 degrees. This means that it doesn’t experience seasons, because of it being basically straight up.
Ceres is covered in countless, small craters but it doesn’t have as many craters as Mercury, which is one of the planets with numerous craters. None of the craters are larger than 175 miles (280 kilometres) in diameter. Due to thin atmosphere that it has, it lets in many asteroids. This is the same reason for all the planets which have loads of craters, they have a thin atmosphere therefore letting in many asteroids.
In 2015, the first visit to a dwarf planet was accomplished by NASA’s Dawn and it went into orbit around this planet. It was an unmanned spacecraft that wast the first probe to orbit and visit Ceres.
If you liked this article and learnt something new then consider clapping and following me. There are other articles I have been doing about other planets. Have you read them? If you haven’t take a look at them. I’m doing more articles about planets, next up there is Eris. Stay tuned until then.
