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Artists concept of the dwarf planet Ceres. In this image the artist is suggesting that Ceres, like all small bodies in the Solar System, is a rather sterile, lunar-like world pockmarked with thousands of impact craters. Sprouting from the lower left limb are hypothesized water geysers. The dwarf planet Ceres lies in the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt and contains about a third of the belts total mass. Ceres is massive enough that, unlike its asteroid neighbors, gravity can pull it into a spherical shape. Dubbed a planet when it was discovered at the beginning of the 19th century, Ceres was subsequently considered an asteroid until 2006 when it was reclassified as a dwarf planet.