Oldest Material on Earth Discovered: 7-Billion-Year-Old Stardust Found in Meteorite
The ancient stardust reveals a “baby boom” in star formation. Stars have life cycles. They’re born when bits of dust and gas floating through space…
Meteorites
Extraterrestrial Clues to Earth’s Lower Mantle From Shocked Meteorites
Deep below the Earth’s surface lies a thick rocky layer called the mantle, which makes up the majority of our planet’s volume. While Earth’s mantle…
First Evidence of Bio-Essential Sugars in Meteorites
Sugar Delivered to Earth From Space Researchers from Tohoku University, Hokkaido University, JAMSTEC, and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center investigated meteorites and found ribose and…
New Clues to Origin of Life on Earth From Meteorite Discovery
An international team has found sugars essential to life in meteorites. The new discovery adds to the growing list of biologically important compounds that have…
Long Before Dinosaurs, a Giant Asteroid Crash Caused an Ancient Ice Age
About 466 million years ago, long before the age of the dinosaurs, the Earth froze. The seas began to ice over at the Earth’s poles,…
Physicists Trace Communication Interception Through Meteor Trails
Kazan University physicists created a refined simulation of a joint reception area of meteor radio reflections. The paper appeared in IEEE Transactions on Antennas and…
NASA Discovers a Massive Crater Under Greenland Ice
An international team of researchers, including a NASA glaciologist, has discovered a large meteorite impact crater hiding beneath more than a half-mile of ice in…
New Method Uses Meteorites to Investigate Supernovae
An international team of researchers has proposed a new method to investigate the inner workings of supernovae explosions. This new method uses meteorites and is…
Primitive Meteorite Brings Scientists Closer to Understanding Solar Evolution
A team of researchers from Waseda University, the Graduate University for Advanced Studies, the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Harvard University, and the National Institute…
Planetary Defense Has Unexpected Support From a New Satellite
NASA’s efforts to better understand asteroid impacts has found unexpected support from a new satellite sensor designed to detect lightning. New research published in the…
Scientists Reveal Secrets of Planetary Splash Marks and Meteorites
Look up above you. You might see blue sky, clouds, the Moon or stars. And while it might seem calm up there, the truth is…
Lunar Meteorite Discovery Reinforces Belief That Water Exists on the Moon
A team of Japanese scientists led by Masahiro Kayama of Tohoku University’s Frontier Research Institute for Interdisciplinary Sciences, has discovered a mineral known as moganite…
Diamonds Provide Evidence of a Lost Planet That Once Roamed Our Solar System
Fragments of a meteorite that fell to Earth more than a decade ago provide compelling evidence of a lost planet that once roamed our solar…
Scientists Discover Bits of the Solar System in an Antarctic Glacier
On rare calm days, the most striking thing you notice at an altitude of more than 8,000 feet on an Antarctic glacier is the silence….
Hypatia Stone Contains Mineral Compounds Unlike Anything on Earth, Known Meteorites or Comets
In 2013, researchers announced that a pebble found in south-west Egypt, was definitely not from Earth. By 2015, other research teams had announced that the…
Halogen Levels in Earth-Forming Meteorites Lower Than Previously Thought
Researchers have found the halogen levels in the meteorites that formed the Earth billions of years ago are much lower than previously thought. The research…
Micrometeoroid Showers Make Big Impact on Mercury’s Thin Atmosphere
New research sheds light on how certain types of comets influence the lopsided bombardment of Mercury’s surface by tiny dust particles called micrometeoroids. Mercury, our…
MIT Geologists Trace Mercury’s Origins to Rare Meteorite
A newly published study shows that Mercury underwent a period of rapid cooling and that the planet likely has the composition of an enstatite chondrite…