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REAL LIFE NEWS: IS VESTA REALLY A PLANET?

by Hazed

Vesta is the second largest body in the asteroid belt, and it’s currently under a great deal of scrutiny thanks to the Dawn spacecraft which has been orbiting it since last July.

Now scientists who have been examining the info Dawn has sent back are starting to question whether it should really be referred to not as an asteroid, but as a planet. It seems the massive rock shows evidence of the kinds of geological processes that characterize rocky worlds like Earth and the moon.

One reason it’s more like a planet than everything else in the asteroid belt is its topography: that is, the elevation compared to the radius. On large objects like the Moon or Mars, the elevation could reach tens of miles, but set against the size of the bodies that gives a topography of about 1%.

By contrast, the largest of the outer asteroids, Lutetia, has a topography of 40%.

Vesta is somewhere in between, with 15% topography, which puts it in an intermediate position between small asteroids and rocky planets.

There are more reasons why the asteroid bears more resemblance to a planet, which you can read by clicking the source link below.

So should Vesta be reclassified as a dwarf planet? That would put it in the same category as the recently-demoted Pluto, and the largest of all the asteroids, Ceres. The Dawn spacecraft will be heading off to Ceres in a few years at which point we’ll get more evidence that could help with the exact classification.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17481911

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