When Sicilian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi spotted Ceres in 1801, he thought it was a planet. Astronomers didn't know about asteroids at that time. Now we know there's an enormous quantity of them, primarily residing in the ...
Major smashups between rocky bodies shaped our solar system. Observations of a similar crash give clues about how frequent these events are around other stars.
Eucalypts make up more than 70 per cent of Australia's forests and some of Australia's most extreme fire events, such as the 2009 Black Saturday fires and the most severe of the 2019/20 bushfires, occurred in this type of ...
What makes a planet a planet? The answer turns out to be rather contentious. The official definition of a planet, as defined by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) is that a planet must satisfy three conditions:
The detailed images of these 42 objects are a leap forward in exploring asteroids, made possible thanks to ground-based telescopes, and contribute to answering the ultimate question of life, the Universe, and everything.
The dwarf planet Vesta is helping scientists better understand the earliest era in the formation of our solar system. Two recent papers involving scientists from the University of California, Davis, use data from meteorites ...
When it comes time for NASA's Psyche spacecraft to power itself through deep space, it'll be more brain than brawn that does the work. Once the stuff of science fiction, the efficient and quiet power of electric propulsion ...
Water is essential for life on Earth and other planets, and scientists have found ample evidence of water in Mars' early history. But Mars has no liquid water on its surface today. New research from Washington University ...
The asteroid Vesta is the second largest asteroid in our Solar System. With a diameter of about 330 miles, it orbits the sun between the planets Mars and Jupiter.
The widely studied metallic asteroid known as 16 Psyche was long thought to be the exposed iron core of a small planet that failed to form during the earliest days of the solar system. But new University of Arizona-led research ...
