Asteroid Hygiea bags the title of being the Dwarf Planet

First time Astronomers have observed asteroid Hygiea in high resolution unlike before.  Astronomers have found that has a spherical shape. Due to this invention, Hygiea has taken over the title from Ceres of being a smallest dwarf type of planet in our solar system.  The location of Hygiea is in the asteroid belt which lies between Mars and Jupiter.  Hygiea is the fourth largest object in this belt, between Mars and Jupiter.

The asteroid clearly satisfies the three major requirements as per the criteria devised by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) that defines a dwarf planet. A Dwarf planet orbits around the sun, and like other planets, it does not have any moon. Also around orbit, it has no cleared neighborhood. The last requirement is that the object is in spherical shape and has mass in enough quantity, so that it has its own gravity.

The diameter of Hygiea has been estimated to be just over 430 kilometers (267 miles), which is almost one-fifth of the famous dwarf planet, Pluto, with a width of around 2400 kilometers (1490 miles) and visibly less than that of Ceres, another dwarf planet, with a diameter of 950 kilometers (590 miles). The VLT and SPHERE, which is a new generation adaptive optics instrument, asteroids in the main belt can be imaged in high resolutions, thereby decreasing the gap between Earth-based and Inter-planetary missions.

Since Hygiea, being the largest member of the Hygiea family of asteroids, a collection of approximately 7000 objects with their roots to same parent, the scientific expectation was to discover a massive crater pertaining to the origin. However, it was a surprising revelation that, unlike other deemed dwarfs planets like Vesta, Hygiea does not have presence of a big impact basin. The need right now is to make substantial investigation and establish strict evidences before fully declaring it as a Dwarf Planet.