Abstract
January 1, 1801.—After the enunciation of Bode's law and the discovery of Uranus, it was thought there must be an undiscovered planet the path of which lay between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. A group of astronomers, therefore, agreed to make a systematic search, and on January 1, 1801, Giuseppe Piazzi, at Palermo, saw Ceres, the first of the minor planets or asteroids. By 1845 four others had been discovered, but since the application of photography to astronomy many hundreds have been identified. Ceres, however, is the largest, being 485 miles in diameter.
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S., E. Calendar of Discovery and Invention. Nature 119, 33 (1927). https://doi.org/10.1038/119033a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/119033a0