If December’s best natural sky show seems to get better every year, it isn’t your imagination. It’s science, and it’s spectacular! Every year, the Earth travels some 940 million kilometers […]
Search Results
You searched for: Asteroid
Sedna could be the very first known object from the Inner Oort Cloud. But time is running out to create and launch a mission. In 2003, scientists discovered an object beyond […]
The discovery of the first-ever asteroid to arrive from interstellar space is full of lessons for us all. On October 19th, astronomers discovered an objectunlike any other we’d seen before: a […]
It’s the first, most naive question you might think to ask. The solution is a lot more complicated than you imagine. According to a large amount of evidence, the overwhelming majority […]
The probe, no larger than a car, will be the closest a man-made object has ever gotten to the sun. We will be able to study and see it like we’ve never seen it before.
With a 5-10 year warning, we could develop a plan to change an asteroid’s trajectory.
The ultimate fate of the universe is a mind-bogglingly thing to think about. So what’s the final outcome for it all?
There have been some interesting “sightings” in the news these days.
▸
with
Citizen scientists are advancing scientific knowledge.
The ices and rock aren’t green, and neither are the tails. So where does a comet’s green color come from? Every so often, with extreme regularity, comets will plunge from beyond […]
Stars don’t stay the same throughout their life, and the Sun is no exception. Here’s what’s going on. Here on Earth, the ingredients for life to survive, thrive, evolve, and sustain […]
For the first time, an object from outside our solar system is observed traveling through our neighborhood.
A recent study points to the possibility that just 70,000 years ago, a star passed through our Solar System. How often does this happen, and what are the consequences? We […]
When it comes to the Solar System, all we have left are the survivors. At last, that might be enough to know what happened 4.5 billion years ago. We know what […]
Our understanding of the universe has expanded tremendously in the last few decades. But there are still some mysteries out there, and the Great Attractor is one of them.
Harvard’s theoretical physicist Lisa Randall links the extinction of the dinosaurs to the mysterious “dark matter”.
The launch of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy was widely covered by the media, but one astrophotographer wanted a different kind of shot of the Tesla Roadster tumbling through space.
There’s a halo of dark matter permeating every galaxy, and that means its particles pass through us, too. The Universe, despite all the planets, stars, gas, dust, galaxies, and more we […]
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft taught us more than we ever imagined about Saturn. Could we do something similar for Uranus and Neptune? From where we are in the Solar System, looking out […]
Asteroid strikes and supervolcano eruptions may yet have patterns to them, but the extinctions we’ve experienced appear to have occurred at random. Throughout the history of life on Earth, there have […]
The possibilities were almost limitless, so why does everything line up? Our Solar System is an orderly place, with the four inner planets, the asteroid belt, and the gas giant worlds […]
There’s a big difference between evidence and wishful thinking. The story of how life arose on Earth is one of the great mysteries of modern science. We know, in many […]
Intelligent aliens, if they exist in the galaxy or the Universe, might be detectable from a variety of signals: electromagnetic, from planet modification, or because they’re spacefaring. But we haven’t […]
Thanks to NASA’s HiRISE camera, prepare to see Mars in a whole new light. Twelve years ago, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter launched. The descent of Mars Science Laboratory (i.e., the Curiosity […]
The Plasmodium Consortium seeks to get answers to America’s problems from slime molds.
Dark energy is pushing distant galaxies apart from one another at an increasing rate. If the Big Rip hypothesis is true, things will only get worse from here. One of the […]
Life never ceases to surprise, even when faced with the unforgiving environment of space.
The ingredients for life are everywhere, but so far the only life we know of comes from Earth. Here’s how that might change. Ever since human beings first turned our eyes […]
No other object this large has come so close to Earth in millions of years. In the 5th millennium, we might suffer the consequences. “Honestly, if you’re given the choice […]
The first component of a planned “space kingdom” has been launched into orbit.