Curated category
Named minor planets
- HaumeaHaumea is a dwarf planet so strange that astronomers initially struggled to believe what they were seeing. Spinning faster than any other large body in the…
- PlutoPluto sits roughly 39.5 AU from the Sun, so far away that sunlight takes 5.5 hours just to reach it. When Clyde Tombaugh spotted a faint moving speck on…
- 4 Vesta4 Vesta sits in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and on the 29th of March 1807 a German astronomer named Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers spotted…
- MakemakeMakemake is a dwarf planet drifting in the frozen outer reaches of the Solar System, so far from Earth that even the most powerful telescopes see it only as…
- Eris (dwarf planet)Eris, minor-planet number 136199, upended the Solar System's address book in a single announcement on the 29th of July 2005.
- 25143 Itokawa25143 Itokawa sent the first grains of asteroid soil ever returned to Earth at 13:51 UTC on the 13th of June 2010. A small capsule from Japan's Hayabusa…
- 2 Pallas2 Pallas sits in the asteroid belt as the third-largest asteroid in the Solar System, and it has been hiding in plain sight since the night of the 5th of…
- Ceres (dwarf planet)Ceres sits in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and it has been classified as a planet, demoted to an asteroid, and upgraded again to dwarf…
- 243 Ida243 Ida is an asteroid in the Koronis family of the main asteroid belt, and on the 28th of August 1993 it became the site of one of the most surprising…
- 951 Gaspra951 Gaspra is a small, angular rock drifting near the inner edge of the asteroid belt, roughly 2.21 astronomical units from the Sun.
- 10199 Chariklo10199 Chariklo sits in the cold dark between Saturn and Uranus, roughly 250 kilometers across, quietly circling the Sun every 62.5 years.
- 10 Hygiea10 Hygiea is a world hiding in plain sight, tucked in the outer reaches of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
- 2060 Chiron2060 Chiron started its modern life as a small smudge on photographic plates taken at Palomar Observatory on the 18th of October 1977.
- 594913 ꞌAylóꞌchaxnim594913 ꞌAylóꞌchaxnim orbits the Sun in a place no asteroid had ever been confirmed to reach: entirely inside the orbit of Venus.
- 433 Eros433 Eros is a peanut-shaped rock tumbling through space about 70 times farther from us than the Moon, and it has rewritten several chapters of astronomical…
- 15760 Albion15760 Albion was discovered in 1992 by David C. Jewitt and Jane X. Luu at the Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii. It became the first trans-Neptunian object…
- 541132 LeleākūhonuaLeleākūhonua has a visual magnitude of 24.64, placing it in roughly the same faint range as Pluto's smaller moons. Three American astronomers found it on the…