The “Big Bang” may have started the universe but it’s likely that littler bangs played a key role in life on Earth, say Albion College physics professor Nicolle Zellner and chemistry professor Vanessa McCaffrey. They (along with former student Jayden Butler, ’17) share their fascinating findings on the interspace dispersal of glycolaldehyde (GLA) in an article recently published by the journal Astrobiology.

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Professor ARAKAWA Masahiko (Graduate School of Science, Kobe University, Japan) and members of the Hayabusa2 mission discovered more than 200 boulders ranging from 30cm to 6m in size, which either newly appeared or moved as a result of the artificial impact crater created by Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa2’s Small Carry-on Impactor (SCI) on April 5th,

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After years of detective work, scientists working on the European Space Agency (ESA) Rosetta mission have now been able to locate where the Philae lander made its second and penultimate contact with the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on 12 November 2014, before finally coming to a halt 30 metres away.

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Centaurs are minor planets believed to have originated in the Kuiper Belt in the outer solar system. They sometimes have comet-like features such as tails and comae – clouds of dust particles and gas – even though they orbit in a region between Jupiter and Neptune where it is too cold for water to readily sublimate,

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On a cold winter night in 2018, when a fireball streaked across the skies above Canada and the Midwest, a team of meteor hunters turned to weather radar to pinpoint its likely landing spot.

The fireball had come to rest on a frozen lake in Michigan. Researchers raced to find it and,

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Asteroids have been orbiting the sun for thousands of millennia in deep space, standing as ancient storytellers, holding clues about the formation of the solar system. NASA’s first mission to collect a sample from an asteroid, the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx), is now ready to make its first collection attempt of the potentially dangerous asteroid Bennu and bring its secrets home to Earth.

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A new theory explains the mysterious explosion in Siberia, scientists say, suggesting Earth barely escaped a far greater catastrophe.

In the early morning of June 30, 1908, a massive explosion flattened entire forests in a remote region of Eastern Siberia along the Tunguska River. Curiously, the explosion left no crater,

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New findings from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission suggest that the interior of the asteroid Bennu could be weaker and less dense than its outer layers – like a creme-filled chocolate egg flying though space.

The results appear in a study published in the journal Science Advances and led by the University of Colorado Boulder’s OSIRIS-REx team,

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NASA’s first asteroid sample return mission now knows much more about the material it’ll be collecting in just a few weeks. In a special collection of six papers published in the journals Science and Science Advances, scientists on the OSIRIS-REx mission present new findings on asteroid Bennu’s surface material, geological characteristics,

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A study of comet motions indicates that the solar system has a second alignment plane. Analytical investigation of the orbits of long-period comets shows that the aphelia of the comets, the point where they are farthest from the Sun, tend to fall close to either the well-known ecliptic plane where the planets reside or a newly discovered “empty ecliptic.”

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