You read that right. There’s a planet between Mars and Jupiter.
You may not have heard of it, but it was discovered in 1801 — 129 years before Pluto. It originally was called a planet, then later an asteroid and now it’s called a dwarf planet.
Its name is Ceres (pronounced like series) and you’ll likely be hearing a lot more about it in the coming weeks.
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But a sixth possible dwarf planet already is on NASA’s watch list. Called 2012 VP113, it’s believed to be one of the most distant objects in our solar system. On its Solar System Exploration website, NASA says the object was nicknamed “Biden” after Vice President Joseph Biden because of the VP in its initial designation. It will be up to the IAU to decide if i2012 VP113 is a dwarf planet and whether it gets an official name.
But expect the numbers for planets in our solar system to keep changing. Mike Brown, the CalTech astronomy professor who helped discover dwarf planet Eris and who takes responsibility for killing off Pluto as a full-fledged planet, has his own tally listing more than 360 possible dwarf planets. And NASA has said there may be many more dwarf planets that we haven’t found yet.
So Ceres, and its cousins, may soon outnumber the traditional planets you learned about in grade school.
