Jay TateAliens could be all around us. Lurking on the edge, waiting to invade our solar system. Not little green creatures, but asteroids from other stars. That’s the conclusion of a new study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The outer solar system is filled with asteroids and comets.
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Jay TateLarge craters on the surface of the moon suggests the Earth-moon system was slammed by an asteroid shower 800 million years ago, according to a survey published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.
Roughly 65.5 million years ago, a massive asteroid struck the Yucatan Peninsula. The violence of the Chicxulub impact is credited with triggering the mass extinction event that killed off the dinosaurs.
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Jay TateRecent NASA missions to asteroids have gathered important data about the early evolution of our Solar System, planet formation, and how life may have originated on Earth. These missions also provide crucial information to deflect asteroids that could hit Earth.
Missions like the OSIRIS-REx mission to Asteroid Bennu and the Hyabusa II mission to Ryugu,
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Jay TateESA’s Gaia space observatory is an ambitious mission to construct a three-dimensional map of our galaxy by making high-precision measurements of over one billion stars. However, on its journey to map distant suns, Gaia is revolutionising a field much closer to home. By accurately mapping the stars, it is helping researchers track down lost asteroids.
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Jay TateModelling of the Chicxulub asteroid impact 66 million years ago shows it created a world largely unsuitable for dinosaurs to live in.
The asteroid, which struck the Earth off the coast of Mexico at the end of the Cretaceous era 66 million years ago, has long been believed to be the cause of the demise of all dinosaur species except those that became birds.
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Jay TateOur planet exists within the vicinity of thousands of Near-Earth Objects (NEOs), some of which – Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) – carry the risk of impacting Earth causing major damage to infrastructure and loss of life.
Methods to mitigate such a collision are highly desirable. A new paper published in EPJ Special Topics,
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Jay TateDebris from a comet may have levelled an ancient village in Syria during a spate of several such explosions occurring around the world, according to new research.
The village of Abu Hureyra was a mound settlement in northern Syria around 13,000 years ago. The site was quickly excavated in 1972 and 1973,
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Jay TateThe emergency preparedness activities now underway to combat the coronavirus pandemic offer insight about our readiness to deal with a dangerous incoming asteroid, experts say.
Humanity can learn some valuable lessons about planetary defense from the things that have gone right and wrong in the coronavirus fight, according to asteroid scientists and an authority on emergency preparedness.
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Jay TateQueen guitarist and astrophysicist Brian May has teamed up with asteroid researchers to investigate striking similarities and a puzzling difference between separate bodies explored by space probes. The research team ran a supercomputer-based ‘fight club’ involving simulated large asteroid collisions to probe the objects’ likely origins. Their work is reported in Nature Communications.
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Jay TateA new study reveals the Chicxulub impact crater may have harbored a vast and long-lived hydrothermal system after the catastrophic impact event linked to the extinction of dinosaurs 66 million years ago.
The Chicxulub impact crater, roughly 180 kilometers in diameter, is the best preserved large impact structure on Earth and a target for exploration of several impact-related phenomena.
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