Solar System; Asteroids

The asteroid 16 Psyche, which NASA intends to visit with a spacecraft in 2026, may be less heavy metal and more hard rock than scientists have surmised, according to a new study by researchers from Brown and Purdue universities. Psyche,…

Ever since scientists started looking at meteorites with microscopes, they've been puzzled -- and fascinated -- by what's inside. Most meteorites are made of tiny beads of glass that date back to the earliest days of the solar system,…

Using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT) in Chile, astronomers have imaged 42 of the largest objects in the asteroid belt, located between Mars and Jupiter. Never before had such a large group of asteroids…

The dwarf planet Vesta is helping scientists better understand the earliest era in the formation of our solar system. Two recent papers involving scientists from the University of California, Davis, use data from meteorites derived from…

In 2019, astronomers spotted something incredible in our backyard: a rogue comet from another star system. Named Borisov, the icy snowball traveled 110,000 miles per hour and marked the first and only interstellar comet ever detected by…

Researchers have developed a novel technique to investigate the dynamics of the early Solar System by analyzing magnetites in meteorites utilizing the wave nature of electrons. Within meteorites, the magnetic fields associated with the…