Asteroid Hygiea May Be the Smallest Dwarf Planet in the Solar System

[Judi Lynn]

By Doris Elin Urrutia 3 hours ago Science & Astronomy

Step aside, Ceres. There's a new smallest dwarf planet in town.



The asteroid Hygiea may qualify as a dwarf planet — and it could steal the title of the smallest dwarf planet in the solar system!

Astronomers have captured high-resolution imagery of Hygiea, the fourth largest rock in the Asteroid Belt. And low and behold, Hygiea is spherical in shape. That's a pretty important dwarf-planet marker, and the only one Hygiea was missing until now.

Asteroids boast a variety of shapes, but the rounded shape of dwarf planets shows that they had enough mass for its own gravity to pull it into this round shape. Hygiea already met the other requirements for dwarf-planet classification since it orbits the sun, is not a moon orbiting another planet and has not cleared other objects out of its own orbit.



Hygiea, a contender for the smallest planet in the solar system, is featured in this new image from
the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile.

(Image credit: ESO/P. Vernazza et al./MISTRAL algorithm (ONERA/CNRS))

So, how big is this potential new member of the dwarf planet family? The team of astronomers, led by researcher Pierre Vernazza of the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille in France constrained Hygiea's size, and estimated its diameter is just over 267 miles (430 kilometers). For comparison, Hygiea is less than one-fifth the width of its most famous cousin, Pluto, which has a diameter of about 1,491 miles (2,400 km).

More:
https://www.space.com/asteroid-hygiea-may-be-smallest-dwarf-planet.html?utm_source=notification