By Allison Kubo Hutchison Comparison of Earth, the Moon, and Ceres. Image by Gregory Revera NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA. Ceres is the largest body in the asteroid belt. It represents the history of our solar system as a protoplanet, a planetary embryo which formed 4.56 billion years ago. Earth itself is made of the agglomeration of several planetary embryos and in Ceres we can see the early stages of solar system evolution. The gravity of Ceres has pleasantly rounded it unlike many of the smaller bodies in the asteroid belt. Due to its size Ceres was the first object in the asteroid belt to be discovered in 1801 by Giuseppe Piazzi and was originally thought to be a planet. It was later reclassified to an asteroid and then with the reclassification of Pluto in 2006 Ceres finally fell into place as a dwarf planet. Ceres unlike other solar bodies such as Europa and Earth has no source of internal heat. Earth heat from the decay of radioactive materials in the core while Europa h
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