Facts about Ceres
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About 200 million tons of water vapor escape from Ceres annually through sublimation, making it the only known active dwarf planet in our solar system.
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Occator Crater, Ceres' most prominent feature, displays a central bright dome composed of frozen water and ammonia ice that reaches approximately 600 meters above the crater floor.
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Ceres was reclassified from asteroid to dwarf planet in 2006 by the International Astronomical Union, becoming the first dwarf planet officially recognized in our solar system.
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Ceres' gravity is so weak at only 0.27 meters per second squared that an astronaut weighing 100 kilograms on Earth would weigh just 2.7 kilograms on the dwarf planet's surface.
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Ahchoo Crater, Ceres' largest impact basin, measures approximately 280 kilometers across and was likely formed within the past billion years by a massive asteroid collision.
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Organic compounds including amino acids were detected in Ceres' regolith by the Dawn spacecraft, suggesting the dwarf planet may have harbored conditions suitable for prebiotic chemistry.
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Ceres possesses a thin water-ice exosphere that extends hundreds of kilometers into space, detected by the Dawn spacecraft's infrared instruments in 2016.
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Ceres orbits the Sun every 4.6 years, making it the slowest-moving body in the asteroid belt due to its distance of 414 million kilometers from our star.
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In 2015, NASA's Dawn spacecraft discovered bright white patches of sodium carbonate and other salts on Ceres' surface, indicating past hydrothermal activity.
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The dwarf planet Ceres contains approximately 25 percent of the asteroid belt's total mass despite being only 945 kilometers in diameter.