Tag archives for asteroids
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The top 10 stories on our radar today: Scientists have created stem cells from cloned human embryos, 1.5-billion-year-old water has been found in a deep Canadian mine, and…
The spectacular meteor explosion above Russia‘s Ural Mountains this morning was caused by a likely truck-size rock weighing in at about nine tons. (Related pictures: “Meteorite Hits Russia.”) It hit the atmosphere at an estimated 31,000 miles (50,000 kilometers) per hour, and at that high velocity—many times the speed of sound—tremendous air pressure caused the…
Posted by Friday’s meteor strike over the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia allowed dashboard cams and people with hand-held cameras to capture some fascinating moments. Here are some of the best ones. The above video captures the sounds of glass breaking and car alarms set off by the meteor’s shock wave. (News Article: Meteorite Fragments Injure a Thousand…
Posted by Shockwaves from a meteor caused damage to buildings in central Russia, hurting at least a thousand people on Friday, according to news reports. More than 200 children were among those injured in the Chelyabinsk region, Russia’s Interior Ministry told the state-run RIA Novosti news agency. “Verified information indicates that this was one meteorite which burned…
This Friday asteroid 2012 DA14 will go down in the record books as the closest approach of an object of its size since astronomers began keeping records a few decades ago. Zipping past our planet closer than most orbiting communication and weather satellites, this office building sized chunk of rock should be visible to some…
Night Sky News: Watch a Bright Asteroid from Your Backyard
Posted by Andrew Fazekas on July 29, 2011 
Hot on the heels of last months’ arrival of NASA’s spacecraft Dawn at asteroid Vesta, backyard skywatchers throughout August get a chance to see the space rock for themselves in its best and brightest apparition until 2018. After a four year journey Dawn entered orbit around the 500 km wide asteroid in mid July and…
Posted by Before succumbing to her legendary death-by-snake in 30 B.C., Cleopatra VII, last queen of Egypt, gave birth to twins. Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene II were born in 40 B.C., two of the eight children sired by Roman general Mark Antony during his lifetime. As it happens, the asteroid 216 Kleopatra also had twins: Two…
Take a drop of seawater and look at it under the microscope, and you’ll see some pretty amazing stuff: That tiny splash of the vast ocean is brimming with plants, baby animals, bacteria—a veritable cornucopia of life. Now take a “drop” of the night sky, maybe a section of that seeming void about the size…
The closer stuff is to the sun, the harder it is to see. —Image courtesy SOHO (ESA & NASA) That’s the fundamental problem with vulcanoids, a hypothetical band of asteroids orbiting between the sun and the closest planet in, Mercury. In fact, for years that was the problem with studying Mercury, since looking at the…
If Earth’s moon is made of green cheese, Jupiter‘s biggest moon is made of refrozen ice cream. False-color view of Ganymede — mmmmm, planetary Drumstick! —Image courtesy NASA/JPL/DLR According to a new study in Nature Geoscience, the Jovian moon Ganymede used to be similar in structure to its neighbor Callisto. But then, about 3.8 billion…
Germany takes on the worlds this week, as the 3rd European Planetary Science Congress gets underway in Münster. Today’s cornucopia included a presentation from Gerhard Schmidt of the University of Mainz, who says that platinum rings come from outer space. More precisely, the idea is that platinum, gold, and other precious “iron-loving” metals were stripped…
Not every meteor that slams into Earth is a dino-killing whopper. Microscopic meteorites also find their way down to the planet’s surface on a regular basis, but there’s been some debate about where exactly they come from. In the September 1, 2008, issue of Geology, Mathew Genge of Imperial College London reports that a massive…
