Vesta, thought to be the second-largest asteroid in the solar system, could be a piece of an ancient, unknown planet, a new study hints.

Vesta, the Planet That Could've Been. NASA's Dawn mission released a trove of new information about the giant asteroid Vesta today. By Andrew Moseman Published: May 10, 2012 1:30 PM EDT.

The dwarf planet Vesta is helping scientists better understand the earliest era in the formation of our solar system. Two recent papers involving scientists from the University of California ...

Scientists still aren't sure what to make of Vesta, a small body that orbits the sun. Is it an asteroid or a planet? NASA's Dawn spacecraft could settle the matter. Vesta was spotted 200 years ago ...

Vesta looks like a little planet. "We didn't find gold on Vesta, but it is still a gold mine," said the principal investigator of NASA's Dawn mission.

Confirmed: Vesta, the second largest of the asteroids, is a runt planet. Observations by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft show that Vesta formed within the first few million years of the solar system ...

The giant asteroid Vesta, sometimes known as a proto-planet, has a surface unlike any other airless body previously observed. While Earth’s moon and other airless bodies are generally a ...

THE WOODLANDS, Texas — The enormous asteroid Vesta is more like a small, rocky planet than other space rocks wandering around the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Among other planetlike ...

Vesta, the second largest object in the main asteroid belt, has an iron core, a varied surface, layers of rock and possibly a magnetic field -- all signs of a planet in the making, not an asteroid.

Is Vesta a planet? Well, I like to think that the word “planet” isn’t something you can rigorously define; it’s an idea, a concept. It has fuzzy borders, and rightfully so.

Of course, the odds of the International Astronomical Union convening to name Vesta a planet (the same way they met in 2006 to reclassify Pluto as a dwarf planet) are basically zero.