Security camera footage of the fireball in the sky over Toledo, Ohio. Credit: T. Masterson and the American Meteor Society
Meteorites, simply put, are space rocks that have fallen to Earth. When things like asteroids collide in outer space, fragments can break off. These pieces of rock, called meteoroids, continue floating through space, and sometimes, their new paths collide with moons or planets. When a meteoroid breaks through the Earth’s atmosphere and we can see it as a fireball or shooting star, it’s called a meteor.
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Science Fiction vs. Science Fact: What Will Aliens Look Like? | WUSF Public Media
"They're reflections of our hopes and fears, and not necessarily an accurate feeling of what an alien might be, you know, it's like not biologically correct," he added.
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"Even on Earth, exploring events is a very difficult activity," Barge explained. "It's hard to get robots down there, and it's hard to get samples back, so exploring oceans can be quite a challenge," she added.
Ring-Like Structures Spotted around Protostar IRS 63 | Astronomy | Sci-News.com
Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimetre Array (ALMA) have observed the emission from dust grains in the protoplanetary disk around the infant star IRS 63. Their observations revealed two ring-like and two gap-like substructures in IRS 63's disk.
This ALMA image shows young planet-forming dust rings around IRS 63. Image credit: D. Segura-Cox, Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics.
IRS 63 , also known as IRAS 16285-2355, is a protostar less than 500,000 years old in the L1709 region of the in the Ophiuchus molecular cloud, which is located 470 light-years away in the constellation of Ophiuchus.
Water Found in Sunlight and Shadow on the Moon - Scientific American
For most of the space age, the moon has been considered a waterless world. In recent years, however, a steady drip-drip of discovery has shown that at least some parts of the moon—such as the large, permanently shadowed craters at its poles—contain significant deposits of water. This week, two new studies published in Nature Astronomy turn on the tap a bit more to the prospect of an unexpectedly watery moon.
The first new whiff of lunar water emerged from data gathered by NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA). This modified Boeing 747SP jet provides its 2.7-meter telescope a view above 99 percent of the atmosphere’s obscuring water vapor—a unique capability that allows agile observations in infrared without the use of space-based facilities.
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Strange rings around protostar suggests planets form earlier than thought | Space
Rings detected around a newborn star may suggest that planets are born earlier than previously thought, a new study finds.
Stars are born from dense clouds that collapse in on themselves under the force of their own gravity. As the blanket of gas and dust surrounding a nascent star, or protostar, shrinks over time, a disk forms around it that can give rise to baby planets, or protoplanets .
"Planets form out of the dusty material that surrounds protostars in a disk," study lead author Dominique Segura-Cox, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, told Space.com. "Rings in these disks show where dust is piling up, making it easier to stick together to form a young planet."
More than half of all sunlike stars in the Milky Way may have a habitable planet | Space
On average, each sunlike star in the Milky Way likely harbors between 0.4 and 0.9 rocky planets in its "habitable zone," the just-right range of orbital distances where liquid water could be stable on a world's surface, researchers have found.
About 7% of the Milky Way's 200 billion or so stars are "G dwarfs" like the sun , so that's a lot of possibly Earth-like real estate.
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"This is the first time that all of the pieces have been put together to provide a reliable measurement of the number of potentially habitable planets in the galaxy,” study co-author Jeff Coughlin, an exoplanet researcher at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, California, said in a statement .
How geologists reveal the secrets of the Solar System | Deccan Herald
Of all the sciences, astronomy has shed particularly brilliant light on our place in the universe. But it is not well-known that much of our understanding of outer space comes from a different discipline altogether: geology. Ask somebody to name a tool that we use to uncover the secrets of the cosmos, and they'll likely say telescope rather than microscope or rock hammer.
But if you think about it, pretty much anything we can get our hands on that comes from outer space is a rock. Yes, scraps of space hardware are sometimes safely returned to Earth; and yes, particles from the solar wind were safely returned to Earth by NASA's Genesis mission in 2004. But the amount of extraterrestrial rock that we have on Earth exceeds the lot.
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