Although there was a debate on what exactly Cerere was, p. Giuseppe Piazzi his discoverer. Credit: Inf/Wikimedia
Takeaway Keyway:
- Giuseppe Piazzi discovered Ceres in 1801.
- Initially classified as a planet, Ceres was subsequently called asteroid.
- In 2006, Cerere was reclassified as a dwarf planet.
- The discovery of Piazzi makes him the first discoverer of a dwarf planet.
Born in 1746 in Ponte, in Italy, Giuseppe Piazzi was ordained a priest in 1769. He taught theology, philosophy and mathematics in various points of his career, but in 1787 he became a professor of astronomy and King Ferdinand of Sicily appointed as director of Palermo Observatory. The New Year’s day 1801, Piazzi was working on a catalog of star positions when he identified a new object in the sky, a “light that was a little weak and colorful like Jupiter”. He called him a comet, but suspected it was something more. When Piazzi announced the discovery in 1801, he was classified as a planet and called Ceres Ferdinandea; William Herschel later proposed that it and Pallas (discovered in 1802) were called asteroids. Piazzi died on 22 July 1826. Almost 200 years later, in 2006, Ceres was designed again, making Piazzi the first person to discover a dwarf planet.
