Jay TateBumper car-like interactions at the edges of our solar system – and not a mysterious ninth planet – may explain the dynamics of strange bodies called “detached objects,” according to a new study.
CU Boulder Assistant Professor Ann-Marie Madigan and a team of researchers have offered up a new theory for the existence of planetary oddities like Sedna.
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Jay TateNearly all asteroids are so far away and so small that the astronomical community only knows them as moving points of light. The rare exceptions are asteroids that have been visited by spacecraft, a small number of large asteroids resolved by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope or large ground-based telescopes, or those that have come close enough for radar imaging.
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Jay TateA boulder-sized asteroid designated 2018 LA was discovered Saturday morning, June 2, and was determined to be on a collision course with Earth, with impact just hours away. Because it was very faint, the asteroid was estimated to be only about 6 feet (2 meters) across, which is small enough that it was expected to safely disintegrate in Earth’s atmosphere.
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Jay TateAbout 66 million years ago, an asteroid smashed into Earth, triggering a mass extinction that ended the reign of the dinosaurs and snuffed out 75 percent of life.
Although the asteroid killed off species, new research led by The University of Texas at Austin has found that the crater it left behind was home to sea life less than a decade after impact,
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Jay TateWhen the Chicxulub asteroid smashed into Earth 65 million years ago, the event drove an abrupt and long-lasting era of global warming, with a rapid temperature increase of 5 Celsius (C) that endured for roughly 100,000 years, a new study reports. The monumental event is a rare case where Earth’s systems were perturbed at a rate greater than what’s occurring now from human activity.
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Jay TateA new study has discovered the first known permanent immigrant to our solar system. The asteroid, currently nestling in Jupiter’s orbit, is the first known asteroid to have been captured from another star system. The work is published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters.
The object known as ‘Oumuamua was the last interstellar interloper to hit the First Interstellar Immigrant Discovered in the Solar Systems in 2017.
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Jay TateAn asteroid around the size of a football field zoomed by Earth on Tuesday, but at a safe distance, the US space agency NASA said.
The space rock was discovered in 2010, but only recently did astronomers determine it would not collide with our planet,
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Jay TateESO telescopes find first confirmed carbon-rich asteroid in Kuiper Belt
An international team of astronomers has used ESO telescopes to investigate a relic of the primordial Solar System. The team found that the unusual Kuiper Belt Object 2004 EW95 is a carbon-rich asteroid, the first of its kind to be confirmed in the cold outer reaches of the Solar System.
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Jay TateWith just a few hours’ notice, a relatively large asteroid whipped through the Earth-moon orbit over the weekend. You may have missed it though; humanity only learned of the asteroid hours before the flyby.
A “Tunguska-class” asteroid was first spotted by the Catalina Sky Survey out of the University of Arizona on April 14.
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Jay TateAbout 70,000 years ago, when the human species was already on Earth, a small reddish star approached our solar system and gravitationally disturbed comets and asteroids. Astronomers from the Complutense University of Madrid and the University of Cambridge have verified that the movement of some of these objects is still marked by that stellar encounter.
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