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 ...
In 1949, famed mathematician and physicist John von Neumann delivered a series of addresses at the University of Illinois, where he introduced the concept of the "universal constructor." The theory was further detailed in ...
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 ...
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 ...
Beyond the race for scientific, commercial and military purposes, there is another space race of a more curious sort. A race to be the first to send various objects up there. But why?
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Asteroid 2024 YR4 caused quite a stir last year when it was discovered and originally calculated to have a 3% chance of hitting Earth. Since then models have been refined and while it no longer has a chance of hitting Earth, ...
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 ...
