After an almost two-year journey, NASA’s asteroid sampling spacecraft, the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx), caught its first glimpse of asteroid Bennu…
The detection of “minimoons” — small asteroids temporarily captured in orbit around Earth — will vastly improve our scientific understanding of asteroids and the Earth-Moon…
On March 11, 1998, asteroid astronomers around the world received an ominous message: new observational data on the recently discovered asteroid 1997 XF11 suggested there…
New observations by three of the world‘s largest radio telescopes have revealed that an asteroid discovered last year is actually two objects, each about 3,000…
Nearly all asteroids are so far away and so small that the astronomical community only knows them as moving points of light. The rare exceptions…
A new study has discovered the first known permanent immigrant to our Solar System. The asteroid, currently nestling in Jupiter’s orbit, is the first known…
An international team of astronomers has used ESO telescopes to investigate a relic of the primordial Solar System. The team found that the unusual Kuiper…
NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission has released its fourth year of survey data. Since the mission was restarted in December 2013,…
About 70,000 years ago, when the human species was already on Earth, a small reddish star approached our solar system and gravitationally disturbed comets and…
In popular culture, asteroids play the role of apocalyptic threat, get blamed for wiping out the dinosaurs – and offer an extraterrestrial source for mineral…
Two small asteroids recently discovered by astronomers at the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) near Tucson, Arizona, are safely passing by Earth within one lunar…
Asteroid 2002 AJ129 will make a close approach to Earth on February 4, 2018 at 1:30 p.m. PST (4:30 p.m. EST / 21:30 UTC). At…
After several months of downtime after Hurricane Maria blew through, the Arecibo Observatory Planetary Radar has returned to normal operation, providing the highest-resolution images to…
These images were taken by ESO’s SPHERE (Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch) instrument, installed on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the Paranal Observatory, Chile. These…
Equipped with Newton’s law of universal gravitation (published in Principia 330 years ago) and powerful computational resources (used to apply the law to more than…
Astronomers reveal that asteroid ‘Oumuamua was traveling through interstellar space for millions of years before its chance encounter with our star system. For the first…
An asteroid, also known as the Chicxulub Impactor, hit Earth some 66 million years ago, causing a crater 180 km wide. The impact of the…
An international team of astronomers successfully completed the first global exercise using a real asteroid to test global response capabilities. Planning for the so-called “TC4…