A NASA spacecraft chasing a rare metal asteroid swings past Mars this week for a gravity boost, snapping thousands of pictures as practice for the main encounter in 2029.
If you've ever taken an introductory astronomy class, you've probably seen the Hertzsprung-Russell (HR) diagram. This graph maps out the life cycle of stars by plotting their temperature against their luminosity, and has ...
A great Tyrannosaurus rex strides through the conifer trees of her territory, sniffing the air. She picks up the scent from the carcass of a dead horned dinosaur, Triceratops, that she was feeding on yesterday. She walks ...
NASA's Psyche spacecraft will get a boost from Mars on Friday, May 15, passing just 2,800 miles (4,500 kilometers) from the planet's surface at some 12,333 mph (19,848 kph). The spacecraft will harness the planet's gravitational ...
Using preliminary data from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, scientists have discovered over 11,000 new asteroids. The data were confirmed by the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center (MPC), making this the ...
When we think of asteroids, we almost immediately think of giant rocks bouncing around like the iconic chase scene in "The Empire Strikes Back," and we often hear how they are remnants from the birth of the solar system. ...
New observations by a team of US astronomers have cast fresh doubt on whether the lunar surface could host abundant water ice. Publishing their results in Science Advances, a team led by Shuai Li at the University of Hawaii ...
Even 200 years after asteroid 16 Psyche was discovered, astronomers continue to puzzle over its formation. Psyche is the 10th-most massive asteroid in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, and the largest known metallic ...
A thick layer of haze around the ultra-low-density planet Kepler-51d likely obscures not only the strange planet's composition, but also its origin, according to a new study. A team led by Penn State researchers used NASA's ...
When people think of asteroids, they tend to picture rare, civilization-ending impacts like those depicted in movies such as "Armageddon." In reality, the asteroids most likely to affect modern society are much smaller. While ...
