A sample collected from the 4.5-billion-year-old asteroid Bennu contains abundant water and carbon, NASA revealed on Wednesday, offering more evidence for the theory that life on Earth was seeded from outer space.
Space Exploration
Oct 11, 2023
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184
Meteorites have told Imperial researchers the likely far-flung origin of Earth's volatile chemicals, some of which form the building blocks of life.
Astrobiology
Jan 27, 2023
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356
A new study led by Southwest Research Institute Research Scientist Dr. Danna Qasim posits that interstellar cloud conditions may have played a significant role on the presence of key building blocks of life in the solar system.
Astrobiology
Jan 11, 2023
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140
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 ...
Planetary Sciences
Oct 6, 2021
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158
In the early solar system, terrestrial planets like Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars are thought to have formed from planetesimals, small early planets. These early planets grew over time, through collisions and mergers, to ...
Astronomy
Sep 1, 2021
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531
A Southwest Research Institute-led team of scientists has identified a potentially new meteorite parent asteroid by studying a small shard of a meteorite that arrived on Earth a dozen years ago. The composition of a piece ...
Astronomy
Dec 21, 2020
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315
Most meteorites that have landed on Earth are fragments of planetesimals, the very earliest protoplanetary bodies in the solar system. Scientists have thought that these primordial bodies either completely melted early in ...
Space Exploration
Jul 24, 2020
10
273
The formation of our solar system was a messy affair. Most of the material that existed before its formation—material formed around other, long-dead stars—was vaporized, then recondensed into new materials. But some grains ...
Space Exploration
Jun 10, 2020
0
355
The mystery of some lava-like flows on Mars has been solved by scientists who say they are caused not by lava but by mud.
Space Exploration
May 18, 2020
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2204
Asteroids come in all shapes and sizes, and now astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have observed an asteroid so heavily cratered that they are dubbing it the "golf ball asteroid."
Astronomy
Feb 11, 2020
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359
