Our solar system’s first known interstellar visitor may have a very violent origin story. The mysterious object ‘Oumuamua, which was spotted zooming through the inner solar system in October 2017, … Read more
Hopefully you weren’t too attached to “2014 MU69,” because the most distant object ever explored has a new name. The 21-mile-wide (34 kilometers) body visited by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft … Read more
About 35 million years ago, an asteroid traveling nearly 144,000 mph (231,000 km/h) smashed into the Atlantic Ocean near the modern-day town of Cape Charles, Virginia. The space rock vaporized … Read more
New York City, home to 8.6 million people and one hot duck, has perished in an apocalyptic meteor strike … in a simulation. Over the past week, some 200 space … Read more
You’ve never seen an asteroid like this before. This technicolor marvel is a compilation of more than 11 million measurements of an asteroid called Bennu, all gathered by a NASA … Read more
A Japanese spacecraft deployed a heavy, explosive-packed copper plate toward the asteroid Ryugu in an attempt to create an artificial crater last night (April 4), but it’s still unclear how … Read more
Less than three months after the New Horizons spacecraft zoomed past a distant, cold space rock, scientists are beginning to piece together the story of how that object, nicknamed Ultima Thule, … Read more
When a science fiction plot portrays Earth in peril from a potentially devastating asteroid impact, a collection of heroes usually swoops in to save the day by detonating the enormous … Read more
It looks like NASA chose the right space rock for its asteroid-sampling mission. The agency’s OSIRIS-REx probe, which just arrived at Bennu last week, has already found hydrated minerals on … Read more
A bizarre, blue asteroid that acts like a comet and appears to be responsible for the annual Geminid meteor showermade a close flyby of Earth last year, giving astronomers an … Read more