Before any crackpot gets their hands on this and starts spouting about it calling it Planet X or some other equally crazy thing I figured I would make a thread about it. Vesta was originally called an asteroid but that has been reconsidered evidently because of how evolved it is, officially it is called a "minor planet". There are more than 540,000 minor planets in our solar system alone though. The spacecraft "Dawn" will arrive at Vesta in July and we'll get a better picture of it. One thing interesting about it is quoted here: "This gritty little protoplanet has survived bombardment in the asteroid belt for over 4.5 billion years, making its surface possibly the oldest planetary surface in the solar system," said Christopher Russell, Dawn's principal investigator, based at UCLA. "Studying Vesta will enable us to write a much better history of the solar system's turbulent youth."
“In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.” - Oscar Wilde
