Since its discovery in 2017, an air of mystery has surrounded the first known interstellar object to visit our solar system, an elongated, cigar-shaped body named 'Oumuamua (Hawaiian for "a messenger from afar arriving first").
Astronomy
Apr 13, 2020
16
1353
The solar system is pretty huge place, extending from our sun at the center all the way out to the Kuiper Cliff – a boundary within the Kuiper Belt that is located 50 AU from the sun. As a rule, the farther one ventures ...
Space Exploration
May 30, 2016
0
25
Missions to the moon, missions to Mars, robotic explorers to the outer solar system, a mission to the nearest star, and maybe even a spacecraft to catch up to interstellar objects passing through our system. If you think ...
Space Exploration
Oct 6, 2023
4
190
In 2011, scientists confirmed a suspicion: There was a split in the local cosmos. Samples of the solar wind brought back to Earth by the Genesis mission definitively determined oxygen isotopes in the sun differ from those ...
Astronomy
Jul 5, 2021
0
2948
In the time since the first exoplanet was discovered in 1992, astronomers have detected more than 5,000 planets orbiting other stars. But when astronomers detect a new exoplanet, we don't learn a lot about it: We know that ...
Astronomy
May 2, 2022
5
2611
After a four-year journey, NASA's robotic spacecraft OSIRIS-REx briefly touched down on asteroid Bennu's boulder-strewn surface on Tuesday to collect rock and dust samples in a precision operation 200 million miles (330 million ...
Space Exploration
Oct 21, 2020
1
990
Eighteen years after NASA's Stardust mission returned to Earth with the first samples from a known comet, the true nature of that icy object is coming into focus.
Planetary Sciences
Jan 16, 2024
0
7299
There's an awkward, irksome problem with our understanding of nature's laws which physicists have been trying to explain for decades. It's about electromagnetism, the law of how atoms and light interact, which explains everything ...
General Physics
Nov 11, 2022
2
356
Water makes up 71% of Earth's surface, but no one knows how or when such massive quantities of water arrived on Earth.
Planetary Sciences
Mar 15, 2023
7
975
In the early solar system, a "protoplanetary disk" of dust and gas rotated around the sun and eventually coalesced into the planets we know today.
Astronomy
Oct 15, 2021
2
5825
