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minor planet |
Also found in: Dictionary/thesaurus, Wikipedia, Hutchinson | 0.03 sec. |
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minor planet: see asteroid asteroid, planetoid, or minor planet, small body orbiting the sun. More than 10,000 asteroids have orbits sufficiently well known to have been cataloged and named; thousands more exist. ..... Click the link for more information. . minor planet [′mīn·ər ′plan·ət] (astronomy) Those planets smaller than the earth, specifically Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Pluto. How to thank TFD for its existence? Tell a friend about us, add a link to this page, add the site to iGoogle, or visit webmaster's page for free fun content. |
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ON THE FIRST DAY of the nineteenth century, an Italian astronomer by the name of Piazzi discovered the asteroid Ceres, one of the thousands of minor planets revolving around the sun in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. But that's not the way many interpreted his proposal last year that this icy orb, discovered in 1930, belongs in a catalog of objects known as the minor planets. Most of these minor planets would likely settle into a domain where most comets are thought to reside--two regions postulated to exist at the outskirts of the solar system, the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud (SN:4/21/90, p. |
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