A new "main-belt comet" — a comet-like object masquerading as an asteroid in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter — has been identified, bringing the tally of these beguiling objects up to 14.

Utilizing archival James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) data and novel synthetic tracking algorithms, researchers identified 138 asteroids smaller than 100 meters in diameter within the main asteroid ...

"We are a bit surprised about its origin in the central main asteroid belt, which is a location in the asteroid belt that we did not think many Earth-crossing asteroids could originate from." When you ...

The asteroid that extinguished the dinosaurs is estimated to have been about 10 kilometers across. That's about as wide as Brooklyn. Such a massive impactor is predicted to hit Earth rarely, once ...

Most near-Earth asteroids are thought to drift in from the main asteroid belt. But a small subset may have a much closer origin: the moon. One intriguing example is 469219 Kamoʻoalewa (2016 HO3), an ...

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has enabled another long-sought scientific breakthrough, this time for solar system scientists studying the origins of Earth’s abundant water. Using Webb’s NIRSpec ...

Image Credit: N. Bartmann (ESA/Webb), ESO/M. Kornmesser and S. Brunier, N. Risinger (skysurvey.org) A previously unknown 100–200-metre asteroid — roughly the size of Rome’s Colosseum — has been ...

Where do meteorites of different type come from? In a review paper, astronomers trace the impact orbit of observed meteorite falls to several previously unidentified source regions in the asteroid ...

When considering the unnamed major features of all the moons, asteroids, and comets in our solar system, there are still a lot of places out there that need proper names. That means the International ...

The majority of the known asteroids orbit within the main asteroid belt located between Mars and Jupiter at an average distance from Earth of about 250 millions kilometers. Since the discovery of the ...

Alfredo has a PhD in Astrophysics and a Master's in Quantum Fields and Fundamental Forces from Imperial College London. Alfredo has a PhD in Astrophysics and a Master's in Quantum Fields and ...