Space news stories

New research has revealed that the giant asteroid that created the South Pole-Aitken basin (SPA), the Moon’s largest crater, slammed into the lunar surface from a northerly direction. The study was published in Nature.

A fresh look at data collected by NASA’s Cassini probe nearly two decades ago has revealed new, complex organic molecules on Saturn‘s icy moon Enceladus – pointing to tantalizing chemistry taking place deep beneath its hidden ocean. The research has been published in Nature Astronomy.

New research, published in the journal Icarus, just revealed 63 newly discovered young asteroid families less than around 10 million years old. While many of these young families are likely to exist in our solar system, only 43 had been previously documented.

The beads appear above a swirling hexagonal jet stream at the gas giant’s north pole, and could emerge from interactions between its magnetosphere and atmosphere.

Silverpit crater off Yorkshire coast was caused by cathedral-sized asteroid that set off 100-metre tsunami 43m years ago. The findings are published in Nature Communications.

Glass strewn across southern Australia has been revealed to be the remnants of a previously unknown asteroid impact which happened about 11 million years ago (mya)…The specimens analysed in the new study in Earth and Planetary Science Letters are ‘tektites’…

Orbiting spacecraft have peered inside the swirling vortex which encircles Mars’ north pole during winter and found an unexpected surge in ozone, raising questions as to whether the Red Planet once had a protective layer like Earth. Olsen presented the analysis last week at the Joint Meeting of the Europlanet Science Congress and the Division of Planetary Sciences (EPSC-DPS) in Helsinki, Finland.

Reporting in PLOS One, UC Santa Barbara Emeritus Professor of Earth Science James Kennett and collaborators present their findings of shocked quartz—grains of sand deformed by extreme pressures and temperatures—at three classic Clovis culture archaeological sites in the United States: Murray Springs in Arizona, Blackwater Draw in New Mexico and Arlington Canyon in California’s Channel Islands.

A new analysis of asteroid Ryugu hints that the “potentially hazardous” space rock once had flowing water in its core, possibly leftover from the impact that created it. The new study was published Sept. 10 in the journal Nature.

Scientists at the University of Illinois have discovered that poorly aimed asteroid deflection attempts could accidentally steer space rocks through dangerous regions in space known as “gravitational keyholes” that would alas, still mean they hit Earth, just years or decades later!

Fomalhaut is one of the brightest stars in the night sky and is about 25 light-years away, making it a galaxy amenable to detailed observations. It’s also a young star, only about 440 million years old.

The findings, which are published in Nature, have important implications for our understanding of how Mars evolved. Billions of years ago, the planet may have had a thicker atmosphere that allowed liquid water to flow on the surface.

Until now, the mainstream view has been that stars and galaxies appeared first and that black holes were created only when the earliest stars ran out of fuel and collapsed under their own gravity. But the latest observations by the space telescope, which reveal a gargantuan black hole with only a sparse halo of surrounding material dating back to the dawn of the cosmos, appear incompatible with this sequence of events

In a new study, published Aug. 28 in the journal Science, researchers analyzed “Marsquake” data collected by NASA’s InSight lander, which monitored tremors beneath the Martian surface from 2018 until 2022, when it met an untimely demise from dust blocking its solar panels. By looking at how these Marsquakes vibrated through the Red Planet’s unmoving mantle, the team discovered several never-before-seen blobs that were much denser than the surrounding material.

When NASA’s Dawn mission arrived at Ceres in 2015, scientists and the general public got their first detailed look at this strange and beautiful planetoid. New research can be found in a paper summarising their findings, which was published on August 20th in Science Advances.

The near-Earth asteroid Bennu contains stardust that is older than the solar system and clues about its violent history, three new studies of the asteroid’s sample materials show.