asteroid belt
Meteorites: Why study them? What can they teach us about finding life beyond Earth?
Universe Today has explored the importance of studying impact craters, planetary surfaces, exoplanets, astrobiology, solar physics, comets, planetary atmospheres, planetary…
NASA’s Psyche Mission is Back on. It’ll Launch Towards its Metal Asteroid Target Later This Year
NASA’s Psyche mission is back on track for launch and is now scheduled for a potential October 2023 launch date,…
Another Reason Red Dwarfs Might Be Bad for Life: No Asteroid Belts
In a recent study accepted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team of researchers at the University of Nevada, Las…
The Building Blocks of Earth Could Have Come From Farther out in the Solar System
Earth formed over 4.5 billion years ago via accretion. Earth's building blocks were chunks of rock of varying sizes. From…
NASA’s Mission to Visit 8 Asteroids, Lucy, Launches on October 16th
An early morning launch is planned for the Lucy spacecraft, the first space mission to study Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids. Tomorrow,…
This Object is Both an Asteroid and a Comet
In astronomy, comets and asteroids are defined very differently. Comets have a “nucleus,” usually made of ice and dust, and…
Scientists Figure out how the Asteroid Belt Attacked the Dinosaurs
How do you track an asteroid that hit the Earth over 60 million years ago? By using a combination of…
Two Bizarre red Asteroids Somehow Migrated From the Kuiper Belt all the way to the Main Asteroid Belt
If asked to pick what color asteroids in the asteroid belt would be, red is likely not one that would…
Astronomers Have Discovered a 2-km Asteroid Orbiting Closer to the Sun than Venus
Astronomers have painstakingly built models of the asteroid population, and those models predict that there will be ~1 km sized…
Wow! Asteroid/Dwarf Planet Ceres Once had an Ocean?
Two new studies produced by the Dawn mission team have shown that the protoplanet may have once had an ocean,…