Astronomy, features and articles | Educational Science

May 29, 2023

The Tunguska event was the biggest asteroid impact in recorded history. How did it vanish without a trace?

On June 30, 1908, an asteroid flattened an estimated 80 million trees in Siberia over 830 square miles (2,150 square kilometers). Dubbed the Tunguska event, it is considered the biggest asteroid impact in recorded history. Yet no one has ever found the asteroid fragments or an impact site. The asteroid...

Jun 9, 2023

How to watch a 'potentially hazardous' asteroid the size of Earth's tallest building zoom past the planet Sunday

A potentially hazardous asteroid the size of a skyscraper will zoom safely past Earth on Sunday (June 11), coming within about 1.9 million miles (3.1 million kilometers) of our planet — about eight times the average distance between Earth and the moon, according to NASA. Dubbed 1994 XD, the asteroid...

Jul 19, 2023

A skyscraper-size asteroid flew closer to Earth than the moon — and scientists didn't notice until 2 days later

An asteroid as large as a 20-story building sailed uncomfortably close to Earth last week, zooming by our planet at roughly a quarter of the distance between Earth and the moon — and astronomers didn't notice it until two days later. Now dubbed 2023 NT1, the roughly 200-foot-wide (60 meters)...

Jul 22, 2023

'Swarm of boulders' in space shows the gory aftermath of NASA's asteroid-smashing DART mission

The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted the gory aftermath of the first-ever intentional collision between a spacecraft and an asteroid, revealing a debris field of at least 37 boulders flung thousands of miles into space. On Sept. 26, NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft disintegrated as it smashed into...

Jul 29, 2023

How long can an asteroid 'survive'?

In October 2020, NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft approached the asteroid Bennu. The probe, which had been orbiting its target for nearly two years, lowered a robotic arm and scooped up about 4.4 pounds (2 kilograms) of dusty, rocky material from the asteroid's surface. This material is the first sample of an...

Aug 2, 2023

'Potentially hazardous' 600-foot asteroid detected near Earth after a year of hiding in plain sight

Astronomers have discovered a massive, skyscraper-size asteroid hiding in plain sight near Earth, thanks to a new algorithm designed to hunt the biggest, deadliest space rocks. The 600-foot-wide (180 meters) asteroid — now officially named 2022 SF289 — is large enough and orbits closely enough to Earth to be considered...

Aug 8, 2023

How many 'city killer' asteroids narrowly miss Earth each year?

Asteroids are chunks of rock left over from the formation of our Solar System. Approximately half a billion asteroids with sizes greater than four metres in diameter orbit the Sun, travelling through our Solar System at speeds up to about 30 kilometres per second – about the same speed as...

Aug 14, 2023

The largest asteroid impact crater on Earth is lurking beneath Australia, new evidence suggests

In recent research published by myself and my colleague Tony Yeates in the journal Tectonophysics, we investigate what we believe – based on many years of experience in asteroid impact research – is the world’s largest known impact structure, buried deep in the earth in southern New South Wales. The...

Aug 28, 2023

What is OSIRIS-REx? Everything you need to know about the 1st NASA spacecraft to land on an asteroid

On Sept. 24, NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will come hurtling through Earth's atmosphere, carrying samples of the nearby, potentially hazardous asteroid Bennu. The return is the climax of a seven-year flight — beginning with the spacecraft's 2016 launch — that was the first U.S. mission to collect a sample from an...

Sep 13, 2023

Asteroid that collided with NASA spacecraft is behaving unexpectedly, high school class discovers

The asteroid Dimorphos is behaving in unexpected ways after being hit with a NASA rocket last year, new data suggest. Recent observations of the roughly 580-foot-wide (177 meters) space rock — which NASA intentionally crashed a spaceship into on Sept. 26, 2022, as part of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test...

Oct 18, 2023

Nearby asteroid may contain elements 'beyond the periodic table', new study suggests

A handful of asteroids in our solar system are so dense that no element on Earth can explain their properties. Instead, they may be made of naturally occurring superheavy elements beyond those listed in the periodic table — our current best catalog of 118 chemical elements — new research suggests....

Oct 25, 2023

NASA is locked out of its OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample because of 2 faulty fasteners

Sept. 24 was a big day for NASA, when an orange-and-white capsule containing pieces of an asteroid landed on Earth, charred from its ultrahigh-speed fall through our atmosphere. The asteroid in question, named Bennu, is thought to have been roaming space since the early days of our solar system —...

Nov 3, 2023

NASA flyby of "Dinky" asteroid reveals hidden moon

An asteroid affectionately known as Dinky has been tumbling through space with an even dinkier companion hidden behind it, surprising new images from NASA's Lucy spacecraft reveal. Zooming past the asteroid at 10,000 mph (16,000 km/h) on Nov. 1, Lucy made its closest-ever observations of Dinkinesh (Dinky), an asteroid that...

Nov 8, 2023

Newfound 'moon' around asteroid Dinkinesh is actually two tiny moons touching

On its first asteroid flyby on Nov. 1, NASA's Lucy mission discovered that the main belt asteroid Dinkinesh has a small moon orbiting it. Now, additional images have revealed another surprise: Dinkinesh's moon is not one, but two small satellites. The twin moons initially appeared as one because they are...

Nov 11, 2023

Could scientists stop a 'planet killer' asteroid from hitting Earth?

It's a classic science fiction scenario: An enormous asteroid is discovered hurtling toward Earth that is sure to trigger a cataclysmic extinction upon impact. Intrepid scientists have only a year to launch a preemptive strike against the space rock — to knock it off course or blow it to bits...