Tag: Asteroids

Every day, about 48.5 tons of space rock hurtle towards Earth. Meteorites that fall into the ocean are never recovered. But the ones that crash on land can spark debates about legal ownership. Globally, meteorite hunting has become a lucrative business, with chunks of alien rock traded online and shipped between countries. Meteorites hold the key to the mysteries of the universe, but increasingly, significant scientific finds are being lost to private collectors. Last year, New Zealand formally recorded an apple-sized meteorite weighing 810g. It fell on Department of Conservation…

Two enormous asteroids that struck Earth about 36 million years ago did not cause any long-lasting shifts to our planet’s climate, according to new research. The space rocks, both estimated to be no larger than 5 miles (8 kilometers) wide, impacted Earth within 25,000 years of each other. Geologically speaking, that’s a relatively short period of time, offering scientists a unique opportunity to study how our planet’s climate responded to such an onslaught. Isotopes in the fossils of tiny marine organisms that lived at the time suggest that Earth’s climate…

During the summer of 2022, just after the James Webb Space Telescope started sending us a steady stream of deep-space postcards, astronomer Stephen Finkelstein and his team found a mysterious red splotch in one of those data deliveries. They’d spotted one of the earliest galaxies humans have ever laid eyes on — a realm that represented a distant pocket of the universe our species once couldn’t dream of seeing. And, importantly, they found it on Finkelstein’s daughter’s birthday, a serendipity that blessed this blob with a name: Maisie’s Galaxy. But…

Earth is constantly getting pummeled by meteorites. We are unaware of most of them, as they burn up in our atmosphere before they hit the ground. Every now and again, though, something larger gets drawn into Earth’s gravitational field —  and when this happens, it usually spells bad news for any life living on our planet’s surface.  Scientists know that the vast majority of meteorites that come crashing down to Earth originate from the solar system‘s main asteroid belt: a region between Mars and Jupiter where irregularly shaped rocks left…

The universe appears to have sent us an early Christmas present: the large asteroid that tumbled safely past Earth last week was, in fact, two asteroids melded into one object that resembles a snowman. The asteroid, named 2024 ON, zipped past Earth on Sept. 17 at 19,842 mph (31,933 kph), which is roughly 26 times the speed of sound. The space rock is huge — 1150 feet (350 meters) long, about the size of a skyscraper — but it safely floated past Earth at a distance of 620,000 miles (1…