Smaller bodies of rock, metal, ice, and dust can be found scattered throughout space. These objects travel on their own courses, sometimes silently beyond Jupiter and occasionally quite close to Earth ...

On June 30, 1908, a colossal explosion tore through remote Siberia near the Tunguska River, flattening an estimated 80 million trees across more than 800 square miles. The blast was seen and felt ...

Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars...When you hear the names in order, some of you might think, "I learned that in school."But doesn't the Moon belong to that group?Does asteroid just mean a small ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. A near-Earth object once thought to be an asteroid turns out to be a dark comet, challenging scientists' notions about identifying ...

Have you ever been out at night and seen a streak of light blast across the sky and disappear? Ever wonder where that shooting star came from, or how it got to be in your sky? As the director of the ...

Observations with the instrument SPHERE at ESO's Very Large Telescope have produced an unprecedented gallery of "debris disks" in exoplanetary systems. Gaël Chauvin (Max Planck Institute for Astronomy ...

Learn about an object in space that has emerged as a dark comet, displaying a much fainter glow than most comets. Some near-Earth objects orbiting in space have a serious identity crisis. They may ...

Across the Earth, every night, thousands of automated stargazers are waiting to take pictures of shooting stars. I am one of the scientists who study these meteors. Most movies and news alerts focus ...

The object looks like an asteroid but moves like a comet, so astronomers used some of the most powerful observatories on the planet to confirm its identity. New research led by scientists at NASA’s ...

For almost a decade—ever since 2017, when our first known interstellar visitor, 1I/‘Oumuamua, swooped through the inner solar system—astronomers have been grappling with a small but stubborn mystery.

A near-Earth object once thought to be an asteroid turns out to be a dark comet, challenging scientists' notions about identifying space rocks. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech illustration For nearly three ...