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 ...

Dwarf planet Ceres is one of the most enigmatic worlds in our solar system — one whose secrets scientists have only been uncovering in the last decade. When NASA’s Dawn mission arrived in 2015, it ...

Pluto hasn't been a planet for almost 20 years. In the early 2000s, scientists discovered several objects of a similar size to Pluto. So, during the summer of 2006, members of the International ...

New research suggests that billions of years ago, the dwarf planet Ceres may have had water, organic molecules, and chemical energy — the key ingredients for life. NASA’s Dawn mission data reveals ...

New NASA research has found that Ceres may have had a lasting source of chemical energy: the right types of molecules needed to fuel some microbial metabolisms. Although there is no evidence that ...

A new color map of dwarf planet Ceres, which NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has been orbiting since March, reveals the diversity of the surface of this planetary body. Differences in morphology and color ...

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.