asteroid belt tagged posts

Right: Artist’s graphic of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. NASA/McREL

The sight of a fireball streaking across the sky brings wonder and excitement to children and adults alike. It’s a reminder that Earth is part of a much larger and incredibly dynamic system.

Each year, roughly 17,000 of these fireballs not only enter Earth’s atmosphere, but survive the perilous journey to the surface. This gives scientists a valuable chance to study these rocky visitors from outer space.

Scientists know that while some of these meteorites come from the Moon and Mars, the majority come from asteroids. But two separate studies published in Nature today have gone a step further...

Up to 60% of near-Earth objects could be dark comets, mysterious asteroids that orbit the sun in our solar system that likely contain or previously contained ice and could have been one route for delivering water to Earth, according to a University of Michigan study.

The findings suggest that asteroids in the asteroid belt, a region of the solar system roughly between Jupiter and Mars that contains much of the system’s rocky asteroids, have subsurface ice, something that has been suspected since the 1980s, according to Aster Taylor, a U-M graduate student in astronomy and lead author of the study.

The study also shows a potential pathway for delivering ice into the near-Earth solar system, according to Taylor. How Earth got its water is a longstanding question.

“We don’t know...

One of the most exciting findings from NASA’s Dawn mission is that Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt that lies between Mars and Jupiter, hosts complex organics. The discovery of aliphatic molecules, which consist of carbon and hydrogen chains, in conjunction with evidence that Ceres has abundant water ice and may have been an ocean world, means this dwarf planet might have once harbored the main ingredients associated with life as we know it.

How the aliphatic organics originated on Ceres has been the ...

Astronomers have imaged 42 of the largest objects in the asteroid belt, located between Mars and Jupiter. The observations reveal a wide range of peculiar shapes, from spherical to dog-bone, and are helping astronomers trace the origins of the asteroids in our Solar System.

Using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) in Chile, astronomers have imaged 42 of the largest objects in the asteroid belt, located between Mars and Jupiter. Never before had such a large group of asteroids been imaged so sharply. The observations reveal a wide range of peculiar shapes, from spherical to dog-bone, and are helping astronomers trace the origins of the asteroids in our Solar System.

The detailed images of these 42 objects are a leap forward in exploring asteroids...