Which dwarf planet orbits in the main asteroid belt?

Ceres is the dwarf planet that orbits in the main asteroid belt. It travels around the Sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter and is the belt’s largest object, with a mean diameter of about 940 kilometers. It is also the only widely accepted dwarf planet located in the asteroid belt.

Giuseppe Piazzi discovered Ceres at Palermo Observatory in Sicily on 1 January 1801. It was initially announced as a new planet, then reclassified as an asteroid after many similar bodies were found in the same region. In 2006, the International Astronomical Union’s dwarf-planet definition restored Ceres to a special planetary category: it is nearly round but has not cleared its orbital neighborhood.

Ceres is often described as both an asteroid and a dwarf planet, so those labels are not mutually exclusive here. NASA’s Dawn spacecraft orbited it from 2015 to 2018, revealing bright deposits, salts, craters, and evidence of water-rich materials. The other choices orbit far beyond the main belt.