Asteroid tagged posts

A small asteroid has been caught in the process of spinning so fast it’s throwing off material, according to new data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories. Images from Hubble show two narrow, comet-like tails of dusty debris streaming from the asteroid (6478) Gault...

A popular theme in the movies is that of an incoming asteroid that could extinguish life on the planet, and our heroes are launched into space to blow it up. But incoming asteroids may be harder to break than scientists previously thought, finds a Johns Hopkins study that used a new understanding of rock fracture and a new computer modeling method to simulate asteroid collisions.

The findings, to be published in the March 15 print issue of Icarus, can aid in the creation of asteroid impact and deflection strategies, increase understanding of solar system formation and help design asteroid mining efforts.

“We used to believ...

This is an artist’s impression of ‘Oumuamua. Credit: ESO / M. Kornmesser

New research finds that ‘Oumuamua, the rocky object identified as the first confirmed interstellar asteroid, very likely came from a binary star system. “It’s remarkable that we’ve now seen for the first time a physical object from outside our Solar System,” says lead author Dr Alan Jackson, a postdoc at the Centre for Planetary Sciences at the University of Toronto Scarborough in Ontario, Canada. A binary star system, unlike our Sun, is one with two stars orbiting a common centre.

For the new study, published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Jackson and his co-authors set about testing how efficient binary star systems are at ejecting objects...

A global false-color topographic view of Mars from the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) experiment. The spatial resolution is about 15 kilometers at the equator and less at higher latitudes, with a vertical accuracy of less than 5 meters. The figure illustrates topographic features associated with resurfacing of the northern hemisphere lowlands in the vicinity of the Utopia impact basin (at the near-center of the image in blue). Credit: MOLA Science Team

A colossal impact with a large asteroid early in Mars’ history may have ripped off a chunk of the northern hemisphere and left behind a legacy of metallic elements in the planet’s interior. The crash also created a ring of rocky debris around Mars that may have later clumped together to form its moons, Phobos and Deimos.

The origin and ...