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 ItokawaAstronomers with the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research program spotted a faint point of light on the 26th of September 1998.
- 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 CharikloOn the 15th of February 1997, James V. Scotti pointed a telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona. He was part of the University of Arizona's…
- 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 AlbionDavid C. Jewitt and Jane X. Luu spotted a faint point of light in the night sky above Mauna Kea Observatory on the 30th of August 1992.
- 541132 LeleākūhonuaAstronomers David Tholen, Chad Trujillo and Scott Sheppard spotted a faint point of light on the 13th of October 2015. They were using the Subaru Telescope…