28 October 2019
Hygiea asteroid could turn out to be the smallest dwarf planet yet
...’s SPHERE instrument at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) could be about to give the fourth largest object in the asteroid belt a promotion, as new observations of Hygiea have revealed that this sizeable space rock is spherical, meaning that it has...
04 July 2018
Majority of asteroids come from a handful of ancient planets
... history, a vast swath of them take up residence in a region of space between Jupiter and Mars known as the inner asteroid belt, which is also the main location for wayward bits of smaller rock that find their way to Earth...
09 June 2021
Meteorites impacting Earth mainly come from a very small region of space, new study says
... million years resulted in an increased flux of meteorites to Earth. For some reason, most of the rocks stay in the asteroid belt", says Schmitz. Terfel and Schmitz’s study not only overturns generally accepted meteorite flux theories, it also...
November 2021
Megasatellite habitat at Ceres
... up a structure might be in orbit around a surviving protoplanet, one that locks up one-third of the entire mass in the asteroid belt - Ceres. The author describes this far-reaching and futuristic concept. Ceres is the largest object in the...
January 2019
Visiting an asteroid to find out how life began
... the Sun between Earth and Mars. It was almost certainly once part of a larger body from the asteroid belt, a region of rocky debris left over from the planet formation process that sits between Mars and...
May 2026
Focusing the world on planetary defence
.... Many remain undetected, and some arrive unexpectedly. The largest – emerging from the Oort Cloud or the asteroid belt – represent dangers capable of uniting humanity under a common cause. Planetary defence must be central to how we understand and...
