Ceres, the first asteroid, is discovered by Piazzi
On this day · 1 January 1801
On New Year's night in 1801, a Sicilian priest-astronomer spotted a faint moving point of light that opened up a whole new region of the solar system.
On January 1, 1801, the Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi was cataloguing stars from the observatory in Palermo, Sicily, when he noticed a faint object that did not belong on his charts. Night after night it shifted against the background stars, marking it out as something orbiting our own Sun rather than a fixed star.
New Year’s Day, 1801, the dawn of the 19th century, was a historic moment for astronomy.
Piazzi named his find Ceres, after the Roman goddess of agriculture. It was the first object discovered in what we now call the asteroid belt, the broad ring of rocky bodies between Mars and Jupiter. For decades it was counted as a planet, then reclassified as the largest asteroid.
In 2006, the International Astronomical Union gave Ceres a new title: dwarf planet, the only one in the inner solar system. NASA’s Dawn spacecraft orbited it from 2015 to 2018, revealing bright salt deposits and hints of a watery past on this small, ancient world.
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