Earthbound detectives rely on fingerprints to solve their cases; now astronomers can do the same, using "light-fingerprints" instead of skin grooves to uncover the mysteries of exoplanets.
With its dark, heavily cratered surface interrupted by tantalizing bright spots, Ceres may not remind you of our home planet Earth at first glance. The dwarf planet, which orbits the Sun in the vast asteroid belt between ...
As NASA's Dawn spacecraft prepares to wrap up its groundbreaking 11-year mission, which has included two successful extended missions at Ceres, it will continue to explore—collecting images and other data.
A meteorite has been recovered from a remote area of Botswana. The event is one of a kind as the meteor was identified before entering the atmosphere, and its fall and retrieval documented. It's only the second time this ...
Most asteroids and meteorites originate from the splintering of a handful of minor planets formed during the infancy of our solar system, a new study shows.Â
Around sunrise on Feb. 15, 2013, an extremely bright and otherworldly object was seen streaking through the skies over Russia before it exploded about 97,000 feet above the Earth's surface. The resulting blast damaged thousands ...
Once every month, on average, somewhere on Earth a fireball appears out of nowhere and for mere seconds, casts a blinding flash across the sky before it blows up in a thunderous explosion. It happened last Saturday over southern ...
Nearly all asteroids are so far away and so small that the astronomical community only knows them as moving points of light. The rare exceptions are asteroids that have been visited by spacecraft, a small number of large ...
NASA's Dawn spacecraft is maneuvering to its lowest-ever orbit for a close-up examination of the inner solar system's only dwarf planet.
An international team of astronomers has used ESO telescopes to investigate a relic of the primordial Solar System. The team found that the unusual Kuiper Belt Object 2004 EW95 is a carbon-rich asteroid, the first of its ...
