Astronomy, features and articles | Educational Science

Jul 26, 2019

Football-Size Meteorite May Have Landed in an Indian Rice Field

A small meteorite may have crashed into a rice field in eastern India on Monday (July 22). The strange rock, which weighed nearly 29 pounds (14 kilograms) and was the size of a football, created an imprint in the muddy waters of the rice paddy in Mahadeva village in Bihar,...

Jul 29, 2019

Look Up! Dazzling Double Meteor Shower Peaks Tonight

Look up! Tonight (July 29), into early Tuesday (July 30) morning, skywatchers will be able to view a dazzling double meteor shower, according to the American Meteor Society (AMS). The Southern Delta Aquariids and the Alpha Capricornids will speckle the night sky tonight, combining to 20-25 visible meteors per hour,...

Aug 5, 2019

Martian Meteor Collision May Have Triggered a 1,000-Foot Tsunami

Three and a half billion years ago, a blood-red wall of water as tall as a skyscraper may have hurtled across the surface of Mars, inundating an area of land larger than the United States. Two separate groups of astronomers first put forth the controversial theory in 2016. Their idea...

Sep 4, 2019

What's the Difference Between Asteroids, Comets and Meteors?

In our solar system there are billions, possibly trillions, of rogue objects orbiting the sun. These spacefarers are too small to be called planets and are given the names of comets, asteroids, meteoroids, and if they reach Earth, meteors or meteorites. With so many labels, it's easy to forget which...

Oct 3, 2019

Falling Fireballs Crashed in Chile Last Week. They Weren't Meteorites, Experts Say.

Goodness gracious! Great balls of fire rained from the sky in Chile last week, and officials are still trying to figure out what they were and where they came from. One thing is certain: The mysterious burning objects were not meteors, according to news reports. The fiery UFOs descended on...

Oct 10, 2019

'Cosmic Mudball Meteorite' Smells Like Brussels Sprouts, Finds New Home at Museum

It looks like a block of mud and smells (some say) like pungent vegetables. Nonetheless, the latest addition to the collection at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago is a wondrous thing — a visitor from across the cosmos that fell to Earth earlier this year as a...

Nov 21, 2019

A Rare and Stunning 'Unicorn Meteor Shower' Could Light Up the Skies Tonight

Two meteor experts are predicting that hundreds of meteors will grace the skies tonight (Nov. 21) in a rare event known as the unicorn meteor shower. The alpha Monocerotid meteor shower happens every year between Nov. 21 and Nov. 23, but it typically lights up the sky with only a...

Nov 21, 2019

Your RNA May Have Come from Space, Meteor Study Suggests

A new study suggests that when some ancient meteorites crash-land on Earth, they bring a dash of extraterrestrial sugar with them. To be clear, this is not table sugar (sadly, scientists still have no insight into whether aliens prefer their coffee black or sweetened). Rather, in the powdered samples of...

Dec 12, 2019

'Lost' Iron Meteorites May Lurk Beneath Antarctic Ice. Scientists on Quest to Find Them.

Scientists are scouring the remote Antarctic ice cap for rare meteorites chock-full of iron and holding secrets to the history of our solar system going back some 4.5 billion years. During a six-week British expedition, the team hopes to find up to five iron meteorites in the five square mile...

Dec 22, 2019

Ursid Meteor Shower Peaks Tonight

When meteor enthusiasts think of the month of December, they immediately conjure up visions of the Geminids. Over the years, these have evolved into the most reliable of the dozen or so annual meteor displays. But this year, a nearly full moon almost wrecked the Geminids by lighting up the...

Jan 7, 2020

800,000 Years Ago, a Meteor Slammed Into Earth. Scientists Just Found the Crater.

About 790,000 years ago, a meteor slammed into Earth with such force that the explosion blanketed about 10% of the planet with shiny black lumps of rocky debris. Known as tektites, these glassy blobs of melted terrestrial rock were strewn from Indochina to eastern Antarctica and from the Indian Ocean...

Jan 22, 2020

Earth's oldest known meteor crash site found in Australian Outback

For every major event in Earth's history, it seems a space rock was somehow involved. The formation of the moon? Blame a space rock. The extinction of the dinosaurs? Space rock. The eventual total annihilation of our planet? That'll probably be a space rock, too. (Humans, please don't prove the...

Apr 20, 2020

Lyrid meteor shower peaks this week: Here's how to watch

A breathtaking cosmic light show, the Lyrid meteor shower, peaks this week, and even with social distancing you can be a part of this epic phenomenon. Meteor showers occur when debris from a comet's tail vaporizes in our atmosphere, visible from far below as glowing trails of heated atmospheric gas....

May 26, 2020

Meteor that blasted millions of trees in Siberia only 'grazed' Earth, new research says

A new explanation for a massive blast over a remote Siberian forest in 1908 is even stranger than the mysterious incident itself. Known as the Tunguska event, the blast flattened more than 80 million trees in seconds, over an area spanning nearly 800 square miles (2,000 square kilometers) — but...

Jul 22, 2020

Meteors more massive than the dinosaur-killing asteroid struck Earth 800 million years ago

About 800 million years ago, a flurry of small asteroids slammed into the moon, pocking the lunar surface with clusters of craters. But the moon wasn't the only victim of this cosmic bombardment. If the moon experienced multiple asteroid strikes during this time, its close neighbor and parent planet —...