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Asteroids Research Paper

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Asteroids are airless and rocky bodies that revolve around the Sun but are too small to be classified as planets. Within the inner Solar System, there are more than 150 million asteroids whose diameters are longer than 100 metres. But the number is much larger if smaller ones are counted. In fact, thanks to the advanced telescopes, around 5000 new asteroids are discovered by astronomers per month. Asteroids come in various compositions, shapes and sizes. Some are solid, some are complex mixtures of metals while others are ‘rubble piles’ bound together by the force of gravity. Nearly all asteroids are irregularly shaped (some even have moons of their own or have various tails), but a few possess enough gravity and pull into nearly spherical …show more content…
Composed of rock and ice, Ceres is estimated to make up roughly one third of the total mass of the entire asteroid belt. As mentioned above, Ceres was first discover in 1801 by Piazzi. It was believed by Bode to be the ‘missing planet’ predicted by his law to exist between Mars and Jupiter. It was listed as a planet in astronomy books for half a century. Then, astronomers started to realize the differences between Ceres and the major planets and began rethinking title. In 1847, Ceres and her other newly discovered friends were demoted to asteroids. One hundred and fifty years later, titles changed once more for Ceres. In 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) promoted it as a dwarf planet because it met some of the qualification for a planet but not all. Ceres and Pluto are both spheroidal objects, like Mercury, Earth, Jupiter and Saturn. However, unlike the larger planets, Ceres, according to the IAU definition, ‘has no cleared the neighborhood’ around its orbit. After all, the naming and classifying of planets are just a part of humans’ attempt to understand and unravel the mysteries of space. With the Dawn spacecraft still orbiting Ceres and sending back images and at the moment, in the near future, our perceptions of it may change drastically information and lead to another reclassification. Whatever the case will be, it is undoubted that exploring Ceres as well as the Asteroid Belt will tell us a lot about the history and evolution of our Solar, and may open a new opportunities of yielding materials or energy from

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