Meteorites are rocks from space that survive their fiery descent through Earth's atmosphere and reach the ground. More than ...

main-belt comets belong to a broader population with the umbrella moniker of "active asteroids." In general, all of these objects are on orbits typical of asteroids, but they display signs of ...

Mar. 17, 2025 — New modeling indicates the main belt asteroid (52246) Donaldjohanson may have formed about 150 million years ago when a larger parent asteroid broke apart; its orbit and spin ...

Comets and asteroids were once thought easy to distinguish, but dark comets are one of the new categories springing up to fill the gray zone in between. One recent study claims they may actually ...

Asteroids and comets form the most pristine bodies in the Solar System carrying information about its early formation history. They provide us with knowledge on the conditions in the parts of the ...

But it’s worth noting that NASA has a network of telescopes around the world dedicated to hunting down undiscovered asteroids and comets. A telescope in Chile—part of one such NASA-funded ...

This includes studying the formation and evolution of planets, the moons and rings that orbit them, and other smaller bodies such as asteroids and comets. This study challenges the long-standing ...

While astronomers at NASA and the European Space Agency have been mapping the giant asteroids that crisscross Earth’s orbit, he says, comets are much more difficult to track and therefore might ...

The solar system also contains small objects called comets. Comets are similar to asteroids, but are made of ice, dust and rocky material. As a comet approaches the Sun, it begins to vaporise ...

Sometimes it finds comets and artificial satellites. To date, it has found 283 near-Earth asteroids, 31 potentially hazardous asteroids, 16 comets and 3,082 supernovas.

The Sun’s huge gravitational field keeps many other objects - planets, dwarf planets, asteroids and comets - in orbit around it. The Sun and its planets - Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars ...