Category Astronomy/Space

This artist’s impression shows the exiled asteroid 2004 EW95, the first carbon-rich asteroid confirmed to exist in the Kuiper Belt and a relic of the primordial solar system. This curious object likely formed in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and must have been transported billions of kilometers from its origin to its current home in the Kuiper Belt. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

ESO telescopes find first confirmed carbon-rich asteroid in Kuiper Belt. 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 Belt Object 2004 EW95 is a carbon-rich asteroid, the first of its kind to be confirmed in the cold outer reaches of the Solar System...

A team of physicists, including NJIT’s Gregory Fleishman, has discovered previously undetected energy in the Sun’s coronal loops. Credit: NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory

The Sun’s corona, invisible to the human eye except when it appears briefly as a fiery halo of plasma during a solar eclipse, remains a puzzle even to scientists who study it closely. Located 1,300 miles from the star’s surface, it is more than a hundred times hotter than lower layers much closer to the fusion reactor at the Sun’s core...

The particular dynamics of the instability between the giant planets kept Mars from growing to an Earth-mass planet. Credit: University of Oklahoma

A University of Oklahoma astrophysics team explains why the growth of Mars was stunted by an orbital instability among the outer solar system’s giant planets in a new study on the evolution of the young solar system. The OU study builds on the widely-accepted Nice Model, which invokes a planetary instability to explain many peculiar observed aspects of the outer solar system. An OU model used computer simulations to show how planet accretion (growth) is halted by the outer solar system instability. Without it, Mars possibly could have become a larger, habitable planet like Earth.

“This study offers a simple and more elegant solution for why Mar...

Rutgers University-New Brunswick Professor Dennis Kent with part of a 1,700-foot-long rock core through the Chinle Formation in Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. The background includes boxed archives of cores from the Newark basin that were compared with the Arizona core. Credit: Nick Romanenko/Rutgers University-New Brunswick

Gravity of Jupiter and Venus elongates Earth’s orbit every 405,000 years, Rutgers-led study confirms. Every 405,000 years, gravitational tugs from Jupiter and Venus slightly elongate Earth’s orbit, an amazingly consistent pattern that has influenced our planet’s climate for at least 215 million years and allows scientists to more precisely date geological events like the spread of dinosaurs, according to a Rutgers-led study.

The findings are published onlin...