Most members of the asteroid belt are primitive celestial bodies, almost unchanged from the early days of the solar system. But a small handful of objects are surprisingly active, streaming debris in their wake. A new, close-up look at one of these active asteroids has revealed the impact that triggered its activity, providing a rare glimpse of real-time collisions in the asteroid belt.
On 1 April 2016, the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System ( Pan-STARRS ) discovered a comet-like object inside the asteroid belt. A massive survey based out of Hawaii, Pan-STARRS's primary mission is hunting down objects that might eventually collide with Earth. Along the way, the enormous survey has discovered new astronomical objects and events, including active asteroids.
Quite a lot has been going on:
Asteroid warning: A skyscraper-sized rock is falling towards Earth at more than 17,700mph |
Evener more terrifyingly, NASA’s orbital scans show the asteroid is bigger than some of the world’s tallest skyscrapers.
At the upper end of that estimate, the asteroid would dwarf the Canton Tower in China’s Guangzhou and the Sears Tower in Chicago, US.
The asteroid is also taller than Russia’s famous Ostankino Television Tower and the Taipei 101 skyscraper in Taiwan.
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Asteroid SF6 is a so-called Near-Earth Object or NEO, meaning its trajectory brings it incredibly close to Earth.
Asteroid news: Ancient fossil ice confirms asteroids held water 4.6 billion years ago | Science |
Within the meteor’s matrix, or finer grains of rock that hold larger chunks together, the researchers found microscopic pockets.
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Until now, researches have not been able to study the meteor’s matrix in fine enough detail to spot the fossil ice.
But refinements in microscope technology have allowed incredible amounts of information to be resolved from small samples of the space rock.
Dr Epifanio Vaccaro the curator of Petrology at the Natural History Museum said: “The meteor in question dates to roughly 4.6 billion years ago when the Sun was born and our solar system formed.
Mysteries of the solar system lie within ancient asteroids | Inverse
S ome 30 years ago, a meteorite hit the desert oasis of Tamanrasset Province in Algeria. The Acfer 094 meteorite was tiny — just 82 grams — but it was mighty in another way. At its rocky core, it held ancient knowledge of our solar system's beginnings.
The meteorite is older than Earth, dating to 4.6 billion years ago. At that time, our solar system was forming from the cosmos. That means the same material that makes up our solar system's planets is also within the parent asteroid that this meteorite came from.
Quite a lot has been going on:
NASA Warns Of Earth-Crossing Asteroid Approaching On Saturday
NASA's asteroid tracking system has detected a space rock following an Earth-crossing orbit that's set to approach the planet this Saturday. If the asteroid ends up hitting Earth, it would create a massive explosion in the atmosphere.
The incoming asteroid has been identified by NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) as 2008 EA9 . According to CNEOS, this asteroid is currently traveling at an average speed of 4,832 miles per hour. The agency estimated that the asteroid is about 56 feet wide.
How Japan's Hayabusa2 Stuck Its Landings on the Boulder-Strewn Asteroid Ryugu | Space
As footage of the Hayabusa2 spacecraft landing on asteroid Ryugu earlier this year played for delegates attending the International Astronautical Congress here last week, mission project manager Yuichi Tsuda interrupted an otherwise technical presentation to express excitement.
And why not? Despite encountering a rockier surface than expected, the Hayabusa2 mission made two flawless touchdowns on Ryugu. The successes let the spacecraft gather precious materials to bring back to Earth. Two hopping rovers and a lander deployed perfectly, and a third rover was deployed this fall. After18 months of operations at Ryugu, engineers have learned more about how to operate all sorts of spacecraft on a small world.
Asteroid Hygiea is Round Enough That it Could Qualify as a Dwarf Planet, the Smallest in the
Within the Main Asteroid Belt , there are a number of larger bodies that have defied traditional classification. The largest among them is Ceres, which is followed by Vesta, Pallas, and Hygeia. Until recently, Ceres was thought to be the only object in the Main Belt large enough to undergo hydrostatic equilibrium – where an object is sufficiently massive that its gravity causes it to collapse into a roughly spherical shape.
However, it now seems that there is another body in the Main Belt that has earned the designation of "dwarf planet". Using data from the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch (SPHERE) instrument at the Very Large Telescope (VLT), an international team of astronomers found compelling evidence that Hygeia is actually round , making it the smallest dwarf planet in the Solar System.
'Ice fossils' from the desert | Cosmos
Scientists studying an 82-gram meteorite discovered in the mountains of southern Algeria in 1990 have found fossils of primordial snowflakes.
Not that they're actual snowflakes. Rather, these fossils are tiny pores left behind billions of years ago, when snowflake-like ice grains that once filled them melted away.
The pores measure only 10 microns in size and were found by examining the meteorite known as Acfer 094 with high-resolution CT imaging.
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