NEOWISE mission spies one comet, maybe two

NASA's NEOWISE mission has recently discovered some celestial objects traveling through our neighborhood, including one on the blurry line between asteroid and comet. Another—definitely a comet—might be seen with binoculars ...

Sizes for potentially dangerous asteroids

Near Earth Objects (NEOs) are asteroids or comets whose orbits sometimes take them close to the earth's orbit. An NEO could therefore someday collide with the earth -- and there are almost 7000 of them known, with several ...

NASA survey counts potentially hazardous asteroids

(Phys.org) -- Observations from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) have led to the best assessment yet of our solar system's population of potentially hazardous asteroids. The results reveal new information ...

The legacy of of the Spitzer Space Telescope

To understand the significance of the Spitzer Space Telescope on the understanding of our solar system, think of what the steam engine meant for the industrial revolution.

Triton: A subsurface ocean?

Neptune's largest moon Triton is most likely a captured Kuiper Belt Object. The capture of icy Triton and the subsequent taming of its orbit likely led to the formation of a subsurface ocean through tidal heating. New research ...

Neptune on tiptoes

(PhysOrg.com) -- The formation and development of the solar system, long a topic of study for philosophers and scientists, is today often used as a case study for the formation and development of planetary systems around ...

Some planet-like Kuiper belt objects don't play "nice"

The Kuiper belt—the region beyond the orbit of Neptune inhabited by a number of small bodies of rock and ice—hides many clues about the early days of the Solar System. According to the standard picture of Solar System ...

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