When the International Astronomical Union announced in 2006 that Pluto was being demoted from its status as the sun's ninth planet, many astronomers and non-experts alike were shocked.
Throughout Earth's history, the planet's surface has been regularly impacted by comets, meteors, and the occasional large asteroid. While these events were often destructive, sometimes to the point of triggering a mass extinction, ...
Survey observations using the Subaru Telescope's ultra-widefield prime focus camera have revealed that there may be a population of small bodies further out in the Kuiper Belt waiting to be discovered.
Just how dark is deep space? Astronomers may have finally answered this long-standing question by tapping into the capabilities and distant position of NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, by making the most precise, direct measurements ...
An international team of 45 researchers studying meteor showers has found that not all comets crumble the same way when they approach the sun. In a paper published in the journal Icarus, they ascribe the differences to the ...
Interest in interstellar objects (ISOs) was ignited in 2017 when 'Oumuamua flew through our solar system and made a flyby of Earth. Roughly two years later, another ISO passed through our solar system—the interstellar comet ...
Our solar system is our immediate cosmic neighborhood. We know it well: the sun at the center; then the rocky planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars; and then the asteroid belt; followed by the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn; ...
Apart from the sun, its planets and their moons, our solar system has vast amounts of space rocks—fragments left over from the formation of the inner planets.
The Subaru Telescope's wide and deep imaging observations are contributing information to the New Horizons spacecraft as it moves through the outer solar system. By applying a unique analysis method to images of Kuiper Belt ...
The sun warms the Earth, making it habitable for people and animals. But that's not all it does, and it affects a much larger area of space. The heliosphere, the area of space influenced by the sun, is over a hundred times ...
