{"id":27050,"date":"2024-10-05T03:20:13","date_gmt":"2024-10-04T21:50:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/?p=27050"},"modified":"2025-10-11T12:32:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-11T07:02:08","slug":"ceres","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/ceres\/","title":{"rendered":"What is Ceres?"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><strong>About Ceres:<\/strong><\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>It is a <strong>dwarf planet<\/strong> and the <strong>largest object in the asteroid belt<\/strong> between Mars and Jupiter.<\/li>\n<li>It&#8217;s the <strong>only dwarf planet<\/strong> located in the <strong>inner solar system.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>It was the first member of the asteroid belt to be discovered when Giuseppe Piazzi spotted it in 1801.<\/li>\n<li>Ceres is named for the Roman goddess of corn and harvests. The word cereal comes from the same name.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Called an asteroid for many years<\/strong>, Ceres is so much bigger and so different from its rocky neighbors that scientists <strong>classified <\/strong>it as<strong> a dwarf planet in 2006.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>When <strong>NASA&#8217;s Dawn<\/strong> arrived in 2015, Ceres became the <strong>first dwarf planet<\/strong> to be <strong>explored by a spacecraft.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>Features:<\/strong>\n<ul>\n<li>With a radius of 296 miles (476 kilometers), Ceres is <strong>1\/13 the radius of Earth.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>Ceres is <strong>2.8 astronomical units (AU)<\/strong> away <strong>from the Sun<\/strong>. One AU is the distance from the Sun to Earth.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>Ceres <strong>takes 1,682 Earth days<\/strong> to make one <strong>trip around the Sun.\u00a0<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>As Ceres orbits the Sun, it completes one rotation every 9 hours, making its day length one of the shortest in the solar system.<\/li>\n<li>Ceres <strong>formed along with<\/strong> the <strong>rest of the solar system<\/strong> about <strong>4.5 billion years ago<\/strong> when gravity pulled swirling gas and dust in to become a small dwarf planet.<\/li>\n<li>Ceres is <strong>more similar to the terrestrial planets<\/strong> (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars) than its asteroid neighbors, but it is <strong>much less dense.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>Ceres <strong>probably has a solid core<\/strong> and a <strong>mantle made of water ice<\/strong>. Ceres&#8217; crust is rocky and dusty with large salt deposits.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>What is a Dwarf Planet?<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A dwarf planet is a <strong>body<\/strong>, <strong>other than a natural satellite<\/strong> (moon), that <strong>orbits the Sun <\/strong>and that is, for practical purposes, <strong>smaller than the planet Mercury yet large enough for its own gravity to have rounded its shape<\/strong> substantially.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>The <a href=\"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/iau\/\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>International Astronomical Union<\/strong> (IAU)<\/a><strong>adopted this category<\/strong> of solar system bodies <strong>in August 2006,designating Pluto<\/strong>, the even more-remote object <strong>Eris<\/strong>, and the asteroid <strong>Ceres<\/strong> as the <strong>first members of the category<\/strong>.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>Unlike major planets, <strong>these bodies are not massive enough to have swept up<\/strong> most <strong>smaller nearby bodies by gravitational attraction<\/strong>; they thus <strong>failed to grow larger.\u00a0<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>In June 2008, the IAU created a new category, plutoids, within the dwarf planet category.\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Plutoids<\/strong> are <strong>dwarf planets<\/strong> that are <strong>farther from the Sun than Neptune.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>All the dwarf planets except Ceres are plutoids.<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<hr \/>\n<h3><strong>Q1<\/strong>: What is an asteroid?<\/h3>\n<p>Asteroids, sometimes called minor planets, are rocky, airless remnants left over from the early formation of our solar system about 4.6 billion years ago. Most asteroids can be found orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter within the main asteroid belt.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Source: <\/strong><a href=\"https:\/\/earthsky.org\/space\/dwarf-planet-ceres-muddy-ocean-world\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Dwarf planet Ceres might have been a muddy ocean world<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ceres is a dwarf planet and the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":27051,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-27050","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-upsc-prelims-current-affairs","8":"no-featured-image-padding"},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27050","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27050"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27050\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}