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A grain of asteroid dust in a laboratory is a sample without an address. It can be weighed, sliced and dated, and it will tell you what that asteroid is made of. It will not tell you which part of…
A team led by Maria Schönbächler of ETH Zurich reports that iron and titanium isotopes in samples of the asteroid Bennu are indistinguishable from those in samples of the asteroid Ryugu and in a rare…
Comets are chemistry with a long memory. The ices in one were frozen out of the disk of gas and dust that built its planets, and they have sat in the cold ever since; bring one close to a star and…
Water ice leaves the same characteristic fingerprints wherever it is. Point an infrared telescope at it and it takes bites out of the sunlight it reflects: two shallow ones near 1.5 and 2.0…
The team that analyzed NASA's OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample reports that the material returned from Bennu meets the mission's definition of a clean sample, apart from an isolated 1.24% by mass that…
On Feb. 9, 2023, astronomers pointed an infrared spectrograph at a comet and measured the temperature of the water gas pouring off it. The warmest water was not at the comet. It was a little way out,…
The two rings around Chariklo, an icy body that orbits between Saturn and Uranus, have changed since astronomers last watched them cross in front of a star, and they have changed in opposite ways.…
Astronomers have detected five kinds of electrically charged molecules at once in the tail of 3I/ATLAS, the third object known to have entered the Solar System from interstellar space, and used them…
NASA said Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope were pointed at the same patch of sky and picked out 27 previously unknown icy bodies orbiting beyond Neptune, the smallest of them about 3 miles…
Astronomers have measured colors, sizes and spin rates for 15 near-Earth asteroids that nobody had characterized before, and several of the larger ones appear to turn faster than an object held…
Pull open the drawers of a large meteorite collection and one kind of rock keeps turning up: the gray, stony ordinary chondrite. The dark, crumbly carbonaceous meteorites (the ones that carry water…
Researchers at Arizona State University and two partner institutions tumbled stony meteorites in a laboratory mill and measured how long each took to fall apart. The number of rotations needed to…