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A ten-author team posted a laboratory analysis on Aug. 26 reporting three distinct phases of organic matter inside Antarctic micrometeorites of probable cometary origin, one of them nitrogen-rich and…
Astronomers at Lowell Observatory report that two carbon gases released by the interstellar comet 2I/Borisov rose sharply against a third as the comet neared the Sun in 2019, a change the team calls…
More than four and a half billion years ago, a lump of ice and dust in the outer Solar System got warm enough to melt inside. Water seeped through the rock, dissolved what it could, and eventually…
Astronomers have measured the naked surface of comet 28P/Neujmin from more than 10 astronomical units out, and report that it reflects light differently from the asteroids whose color it otherwise…
A comet is, in the most literal sense, a piece of frozen memory. The ice that makes up its body records the temperature, the chemistry, and the company it kept when it first congealed out of a cloud…
On a night in April 2025, something bright tore across the sky over the Adriatic. To the few people who looked up in time, it was a fireball: a fragment of interplanetary rock burning through the…
The Associated Press reports that South Korea's Danuri orbiter has photographed the patch of the Moon where a derelict SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage crashed on 5 August, returning images of the same…
Somewhere on the Moon, a rock the size of a fist arrives at tens of kilometers per second and stops. There is no atmosphere to slow it and nothing to burn it up on the way, so all of that energy has…
Kallichore is not the kind of moon that makes it onto posters. Less than four kilometers across, it circles Jupiter at hundreds of millions of kilometers from Earth, one of dozens of small, dark…
For most of its life, an interstellar comet is a frozen relic drifting between the stars, its ices locked solid in the cold. Then it falls toward a sun that isn't its own and starts to breathe.…