Our Solar System is filled with diverse and wondrous worlds. From asteroids to gas giants, we’ve sent spacecraft to objects of all shapes and sizes, yet there is still much more to explore.
Among the menagerie of worlds orbiting our Sun are dwarf planets. According to the International Astronomical Union, a dwarf planet is round and circles the Sun like a planet, but has not “cleared the neighborhood” around its orbit. In other words, planets are much more massive than anything orbiting near them, while dwarf planets are not. This definition, which famously removed planethood status from Pluto in 2006, disqualifies known objects in the main asteroid belt and the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune from being named as planets.
The IAU currently recognizes five dwarf planets: Ceres, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake, and Eris. Ceres lies in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, while the rest are in the Kuiper Belt.
There are almost certainly more dwarf planets. Unfortunately, most are very far away, and we can’t definitively prove that they are round. Mike Brown, the Caltech astronomer who led teams of scientists that discovered Eris and other distant worlds, maintains a list of candidate dwarf planets ranked from “near certainty” to “probably not.”
Let’s visit the Solar System’s five official dwarf planets, starting from the one closest to the Sun and journeying outward.
Ceres
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2023-04-19 17:48:45Z
CBMiOWh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LnBsYW5ldGFyeS5vcmcvYXJ0aWNsZXMvbWVldC10aGUtZHdhcmYtcGxhbmV0c9IBAA
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