For decades, scientists believed Vesta, one of the largest objects in our solar system’s asteroid belt, wasn’t just an asteroid. They concluded that Vesta has a crust, mantle and core – fundamental properties of a planet.

Astronomers studied it for clues to how early planets grew, and what Earth might have looked like in its infancy.

Now, Michigan State University has contributed to research that flips this notion on its head.

A team led by the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab or JPL published a paper in Nature Astronomy revealing Vesta's interior structure is more uniform than previously thought. These findings startled researchers who, until then, assumed Vesta was a protoplanet that never grew to a full planet.