NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has confirmed that one of the largest objects in the Main Asteroid Belt is actually a tiny planet-like body that formed around a molten interior like the Earth, Mars, Venus and Mercury.

“We now know that Vesta is the only layered planetary building block from the very earliest days of the Solar System.”

Believed to be more than 4.5 billion years old, Vesta didn’t survive the period of “heavy bombardment”...