Piazzi Discovers Ceres

January 1, 1801

From his observatory in Palermo, the monk Giuseppe Piazzi caught a wandering speck where theory had predicted a missing planet between Mars and Jupiter. He named it Ceres, for Sicily's patron goddess. It would turn out to be the first and largest of a whole belt of rocky worlds. The young mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss developed new orbital prediction methods to relocate Ceres after it disappeared behind the sun.