https://phys.org/ en-us Phys.org internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Physics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. Most near-Earth asteroids are thought to drift in from the main asteroid belt. But a small subset may have a much closer origin: the moon. One intriguing example is 469219 Kamoʻoalewa (2016 HO3), an Earth quasi-satellite whose reported spectrum resembles lunar material and which is a target of China's Tianwen-2 sample-return mission. https://phys.org/news/2026-02-rubin-survey-underway-simulations-lunar.html Astronomy Mon, 02 Feb 2026 12:18:07 EST news689256956 Back in the earlier days of the internet, there was a viral video from a creator called Bill Wurtz called "the history of the entire world, i guess" which spawned a number of memorable memes, some of which are still in use to this day. One of those was a clip from the video where Wurtz states, "The sun is a deadly laser." https://phys.org/news/2026-01-dark-asteroids-die.html Astronomy Thu, 15 Jan 2026 14:58:19 EST news687711481 Betelgeuse is the star that everybody can't wait to see blow up, preferably sooner rather than later. That's because it's a red supergiant on the verge of becoming a supernova and there hasn't been one explode this close in recorded human history. It's been changing its brightness and showing strange surface behavior, which is why astronomers track its activity closely. Are these changes due to its aging process? Do they mean it's about to blow up? Probably not. https://phys.org/news/2026-01-siwarha-betelgeuse.html Astronomy Wed, 14 Jan 2026 08:19:33 EST news687601142 Astronomers analyzing data from Vera C. Rubin Observatory have discovered the fastest-ever spinning asteroid with a diameter over half a kilometer—a feat uniquely enabled by Rubin. The study provides crucial information about asteroid composition and evolution, and demonstrates how Rubin is pushing the boundaries of what we can discover within our own solar system. https://phys.org/news/2026-01-vera-rubin-observatory-asteroid-pre.html Astronomy Wed, 07 Jan 2026 14:28:23 EST news687018482 The giant planets weren't always where we find them today. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune formed in a more compact configuration and later underwent a violent reshuffling that scattered them to their current positions. Exactly what triggered this chaos remains uncertain, but researchers at the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Bordeaux and the Planetary Science Institute now propose a close encounter with a wandering substellar object during the sun's youth. https://phys.org/news/2025-12-rogue-planet-reshape-solar.html Planetary Sciences Mon, 15 Dec 2025 11:04:25 EST news685019042 Much remains to be known about the chemical composition of small asteroids. Their potential to harbor valuable metals, materials from the early solar system, and the possibility of obtaining a geochemical record of their parent bodies makes them promising candidates for future use of space resources. https://phys.org/news/2025-12-feasibility-asteroid.html Space Exploration Wed, 10 Dec 2025 12:38:24 EST news684592668 Observations with the instrument SPHERE at ESO's Very Large Telescope have produced an unprecedented gallery of "debris disks" in exoplanetary systems. https://phys.org/news/2025-12-debris-disk-gallery-tale-asteroids.html Astronomy Wed, 03 Dec 2025 03:00:02 EST news683911862 When a meteor streaks across the sky, it's not just beautiful. It's nature's way of delivering a time capsule to Earth. Contained within are hints about the very beginning of the solar system and how planets, including our own, formed. https://phys.org/news/2025-11-meteorite-samples-capsules-early-solar.html Astrobiology Thu, 27 Nov 2025 11:20:02 EST news683212821 The number 40,000 might not sound particularly dramatic, but it represents humanity's growing catalog of near-Earth asteroids, rocky remnants from the solar system's violent birth that cross paths with our planet's orbit. We've come a long way since 1898, when astronomers discovered the first of these wanderers, an asteroid called Eros. https://phys.org/news/2025-11-asteroids.html Astronomy Tue, 25 Nov 2025 09:44:03 EST news683286241 At this point in history, astronomers and engineers who grew up watching "Deep Impact" and "Armageddon," two movies about the destructive power of asteroid impacts, are likely in relatively high ranking positions at space agencies. "Don't Look Up" also provided a more modern, though more pessimistic (or, unfortunately, realistic?), look at what might potentially happen if a "killer" asteroid is found on approach to Earth. https://phys.org/news/2025-11-asteroid-yr4-earth-real-life.html Planetary Sciences Mon, 17 Nov 2025 16:23:04 EST news682618982 Since comet 3I/ATLAS, the third known interstellar object, was discovered on 1 July 2025, astronomers worldwide have worked to predict its trajectory. ESA has now improved the comet's predicted location by a factor of 10, thanks to the innovative use of observation data from its ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) spacecraft orbiting Mars. https://phys.org/news/2025-11-esa-3iatlas-path-mars.html Astronomy Fri, 14 Nov 2025 09:34:42 EST news682335276 For decades, many scientists believed dinosaurs were already dwindling in number and variety long before an asteroid strike sealed their fate 66 million years ago. https://phys.org/news/2025-10-dinosaurs-mexico.html Paleontology & Fossils Thu, 23 Oct 2025 14:58:03 EDT news680450281 In the distant past, the solar system was rife with impacts and collisions. Millions of rocky objects zoomed chaotically through the system, smashing into each other in collisional cascades. Over time, many of them eventually became part of the rocky planets. What's left of the space rocks are mostly gathered in the main asteroid belt. https://phys.org/news/2025-10-hidden-sun-glare-asteroid-uncomfortably.html Astronomy Wed, 22 Oct 2025 13:30:04 EDT news680358499 Two bright green comets are streaming through the skies and are visible to skygazers in the Northern Hemisphere. https://phys.org/news/2025-10-green-comets-bright-night-sky.html Space Exploration Thu, 16 Oct 2025 12:41:41 EDT news679837287 Human activity may be triggering the greatest extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs, according to scientists. Their study, based on a review of decades of research on environmental change, as well as a series of workshops bringing together paleobiologists and ecologists, compares modern species losses with those preserved in the fossil record. https://phys.org/news/2025-10-humans-extinctions-scale-dinosaurs-scientists.html Plants & Animals Thu, 16 Oct 2025 11:56:04 EDT news679834562 The China National Space Administration's (CNSA) Tianwen-2 probe is currently at a distance of about 43 million km (26.7 million mi) from Earth. This places it in a stable geosynchronous orbit (GSO) and almost halfway between its first destination, the near-Earth asteroid (NEA) 469219 Kamo'oalewa, which is still 45 million km (~28 million mi) away. As is customary for interplanetary missions, its controllers are using the flight phase to test the spacecraft's instruments and make sure they are in working order. https://phys.org/news/2025-10-tianwen-probe-selfie-earth-china.html Space Exploration Wed, 08 Oct 2025 10:03:03 EDT news679136582 Whether an asteroid is spinning neatly on its axis or tumbling chaotically, and how fast it is doing so, has been shown to be dependent on how frequently it has experienced collisions. The findings, presented at the recent EPSC-DPS2025 Joint Meeting in Helsinki, are based on data from the European Space Agency's Gaia mission and provide a means of determining an asteroid's physical properties—information that is vital for successfully deflecting asteroids on a collision course with Earth. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-gaia-mystery-asteroids-probe-interiors.html Planetary Sciences Tue, 30 Sep 2025 13:30:07 EDT news678457179 Young asteroids—which formed much later than those that were created during the formation of our solar system—are typically created when larger asteroids, planetesimals, or comets collide and break up into smaller pieces. These smaller pieces form "asteroid families" that share certain properties, like their semimajor axis, eccentricity, and inclination—all of which describe their orbital paths. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-scientists-young-asteroid-families-previous.html Astronomy Mon, 29 Sep 2025 14:00:01 EDT news678368490 The asteroid belt is found orbiting between Mars and Jupiter and is a vast collection of rocks that is thought to be a planet that never formed. When our solar system formed 4.6 billion years ago, the material in this region should have coalesced into a planet; however, Jupiter's gravitational influence prevented this from happening, stirring up the region so that collisions became destructive rather than constructive. What remains today contains only about 3% of the moon's mass scattered across millions of kilometers. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-asteroid-belt.html Planetary Sciences Mon, 29 Sep 2025 12:56:04 EDT news678369362 An international study led by researchers at São Paulo State University (UNESP) in Brazil has identified a little-known but potentially significant threat: Asteroids that share Venus's orbit and may completely escape current observational campaigns because of their position in the sky. These objects have not yet been observed, but they could strike Earth within a few thousand years. Their impacts could devastate large cities. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-invisible-asteroids-venus-threaten-earth.html Astronomy Tue, 23 Sep 2025 16:35:04 EDT news677864102 With help from amateur astronomers, scientists tracked how an asteroid traveled from space, broke up in Earth's atmosphere and sent fiery fragments shooting to the ground, gathering new information about how these space rocks disintegrate. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-amateur-astronomers-track-asteroid-french.html Planetary Sciences Sun, 21 Sep 2025 17:00:01 EDT news677501992 Astronomers have used observatories around the world, including the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT), to study the asteroid 1998 KY26, revealing it to be almost three times smaller and spinning much faster than previously thought. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-hayabusa2-reveals-space-mission-asteroid.html Astronomy Thu, 18 Sep 2025 05:00:03 EDT news677322228 Some asteroids are more dangerous than others, according to a report published in Nature Astronomy by an international team of researchers, led by astrophysicist Auriane Egal of the Montreal Planetarium in Canada. The team had presented their findings of an investigation into the impact of small asteroid 2023 CX1 over France in February 2023. This new paper revealed that small asteroids can explode on atmospheric entry. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-small-asteroids-abruptly.html Astronomy Wed, 17 Sep 2025 16:44:03 EDT news677346241 When considering the unnamed major features of all the moons, asteroids, and comets in our solar system, there are still a lot of places out there that need proper names. That means the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the non-governmental body responsible for naming astronomical objects, has its work cut out for them. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-lucy-main-belt-features.html Planetary Sciences Wed, 17 Sep 2025 14:30:03 EDT news677338201 Everyone who has ever lived on Earth has been well-aware of the moon, but it turns out Earth also has some frequent temporary companions. These "quasi-moons" are small asteroids that enter into a kind of resonance with Earth's orbit, although they aren't technically orbiting Earth. In August, this small group of asteroids, called Arjunas, offered another companion to add to the list. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-scientists-quasi-moon-orbiting-earth.html Planetary Sciences Wed, 10 Sep 2025 10:40:18 EDT news676718992 Earth is so far the only known planet on which life exists—with liquid water and a stable atmosphere. However, the conditions were not conducive to life when it formed. The gas-dust cloud from which all the planets in the solar system formed was rich in volatile elements essential for life, such as hydrogen, carbon and sulfur. https://phys.org/news/2025-08-collision-life-earth-space.html Astrobiology Thu, 28 Aug 2025 11:31:03 EDT news675599461 The ambitious mission to retrieve samples from asteroid Bennu and return them to Earth is paying off. Just as scientists had hoped, the asteroid is revealing details about the early days of our solar system. More than just a simple space rock, research is revealing that Bennu contains not only material from the solar system, but material from beyond our system. https://phys.org/news/2025-08-asteroid-bennu-capsule-early-solar.html Astronomy Thu, 28 Aug 2025 10:17:04 EDT news675595021 Asteroids floating through our solar system are debris left over from when our planetary neighborhood formed 4.6 billion years ago. Scientists study these ancient fragments as time capsules that reveal secrets about our solar system's earliest days. Now, new research has uncovered a surprising connection between two completely different types of asteroids that may actually share the same dramatic origin story. https://phys.org/news/2025-08-space-tale-ancient.html Planetary Sciences Tue, 26 Aug 2025 12:10:04 EDT news675428836 When NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches in October 2026, it won't just be peering into the distant universe to study dark energy and exoplanets. This powerful observatory will also serve as Earth's newest guardian, helping scientists track and understand potentially dangerous asteroids and comets that could threaten our planet. https://phys.org/news/2025-08-roman-space-telescope-earth-asteroid.html Planetary Sciences Tue, 26 Aug 2025 09:40:05 EDT news675420002 New results from OSIRIS-REx, NASA's first asteroid sample return mission, reveals why some gray asteroids reflect light at different wavelengths, like red or blue, more strongly. How these asteroids reflect light at red and blue wavelengths can give deeper insights into the evolution of rocky bodies in the solar system. The work is published in Nature Communications. https://phys.org/news/2025-08-decoding-clues-bennu-surface-composition.html Planetary Sciences Tue, 26 Aug 2025 08:50:05 EDT news675417002