We're in for a pre-Christmas treat this weekend, as the cosmos entertains us with two equally exciting gifts: the Geminid meteor shower and the interplanetary comet 46P/Wirtanen.
For the second time in history, a human-made object has reached the space between the stars. NASA's Voyager 2 probe now has exited the heliosphere – the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the Sun.
Evgenij Zubko of Far Eastern Federal University (FEFU), in collaboration with international team members, has developed a comprehensive model to explain the results of the recent photometric study of the comet Schwassmann-Wachmann ...
Carnegie's Scott Sheppard and his colleagues—Northern Arizona University's Chad Trujillo, and the University of Hawaii's David Tholen—are once again redefining our Solar System's edge. They discovered a new extremely distant ...
For decades, scientists have theorized that beyond the edge of the solar system, at a distance of up to 50,000 AU (0.79 ly) from the sun, there lies a massive cloud of icy planetesimals known as the Oort Cloud. Named in honor ...
C/2016 R2 (Pan-STARRS) is a comet abundant in carbon monoxide and lacking hydrogen cyanide, according to a new study conducted by researchers from the University of South Florida (USF) in Tampa, Florida. The finding is detailed ...
About 70,000 years ago, during human occupation of the planet, a small, reddish star approached our solar system and gravitationally disturbed comets and asteroids. Astronomers from the Complutense University of Madrid and ...
One of the defining moments in planetary astronomy in 2017 is that this is the year we discovered the first astronomical object to enter the Solar System from interstellar space. Now known as `Oumuamua (Hawaiian for "scout"), ...
In 2013, researchers announced that a pebble found in south-west Egypt, was definitely not from Earth. By 2015, other research teams had announced that the 'Hypatia' stone was not part of any known types of meteorite or comet, ...
The fundamental job of astrophysicists and astronauts is to explore the universe, and find what is out there. This year, the universe explored us.
