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The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted the gory aftermath of the first-ever intentional collision between a spacecraft and an asteroid, revealing a debris field of at least 37 "boulders" flung thousands of miles into space.On Sept. 26, NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft disintegrated as it smashed into the asteroid Dimorphos, which is 7 million miles (11 million kilometers) from Earth, successfully changing the asteroid's trajectory.Now, by using Hubble to study the impact, astronomers have found that DART's roughly 14,540 mph (23,400 km/h) impact on the asteroid produced a "swarm of boulders." The rocks, which range from 3 to...

GALACTIC ENCOUNTERS, APOLLO OBJECTS AND ATLANTIS: A CATASTROPHICAL SCENARIO FOR DISCONTINUITIES IN HUMAN HISTORY Emilio SpedicatoUniversity of Bergamo Acknowledgements The author acknowledges stimulating discussions with Thor Heyerdahl (Colle Micheri, Liguria and Guimar, Tenerife), Laurence Dixon (University of Hertfordhshire), Victor Clube (Oxford University), Emmanuel Anati (Centro Camuno di Studi Preistorici), Zdenek Kukal (Central Geological Survey, Prague), Donald Patten (Seattle), Flavio Barbiero (Livorno), Antonino Del Popolo (Bergamo), Lia Mangolini (Milano), Graham Hancock (Leat Mill, Lifton) and Andrew Collins (Leigh on Sea). Third revised version. First version published in 1985 as Quaderno 85/3. First revised version published in 1990 as Quaderno 90/22...

Meanwhile, the Doppler discovery of extrasolar planets orbiting very close to their parent stars has raised a different problem. Many of the planets are so close to their stars (<0.1 AU), and so hot, that they cannot be supposed to have formed where we now observe them. By inference, they could have formed at larger distances (several AU) and then migrated inwards. What would cause this inward migration? As with the solar system case, the root cause may be an exchange of angular momentum with material surrounding the planets at their formation. In particular, if the extrasolar planets formed in...

Clandestine comets found in main asteroid belt 19:00 23 March 2006 NewScientist.com news service Kimm Groshong You do not have to look to the outer edges of the solar system, or even out beyond Neptune to observe a reservoir of comets. A bevy of the ice-containing bodies lies disguised as main-belt asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, claim astronomers from the University of Hawaii, US. David Jewitt and Henry Hsieh have dubbed the new population "main belt comets". They describe three objects with near circular, flat orbits in the asteroid belt that stream volatile materials, producing an observable tail for weeks...

Rather, the comet's behavior is probably typical for comets making their first trip toward the sun — we just haven't been able to observe it before. "What makes this comet special is that it was discovered early," Jewitt said. "We've been able to follow the way the comet changes with distance from the sun over a much larger range than has ever been done before." Comet K2 comes from even farther away than the Kuiper Belt, Jewitt said. The comet's original home was most likely the Oort Cloud, the repository of comets and planetary fragments that extends from 2,000 to...

“If Planet Nine is real, it would be on such an odd orbit and so far out in the outer Solar System, that it would really challenge our ideas of planet formation and dynamics,” Ann-Marie Madigan, assistant professor of astrophysics... Madigan isn’t searching for just one planet — she’s looking for an entire belt of celestial objects. Like Planet Nine, this proposed Zderic-Madigan, or ZM, belt would be really out there, far beyond the Kuiper belt, with some of its closest bodies being more than twice as far from the Sun as Pluto at perihelion. Unlike the Kuiper belt, this...

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has determined the size of the largest icy comet nucleus ever seen by astronomers. The estimated diameter is approximately 80 miles across, making it larger than the state of Rhode Island. The nucleus is about 50 times larger than found at the heart of most known comets. Its mass is estimated to be a staggering 500 trillion tons, a hundred thousand times greater than the mass of a typical comet found much closer to the Sun. The behemoth comet, C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein) is barreling this way at 22,000 miles per hour from the edge of the...

I have carried out a search for Planet 9 in the IRAS data. At the distance range proposed for Planet 9, the signature would be a 60 micron unidentified IRAS point source with an associated nearby source from the IRAS Reject File of sources which received only a single hours-confirmed (HCON) detection. The confirmed source should be detected on the first two HCON passes, but not on the third, while the single HCON should be detected only on the third HCON. I have examined the unidentified sources in three IRAS 60micron catalogues: some can be identified with 2MASS galaxies, Galactic...

An Astronomer has released our best and sharpest look to date at Comet Borisov, the second ever-known interstellar object to visit our solar system, using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to capture the new image. The comet was travelling at around 110,000 miles per hour when University of California Los Angeles astronomer David Jewitt studied it on October 12, 2019, when it was 260 million miles away. The comet — which is named after the Crimean astronomer who discovered it — will pass within around 177,000 miles (285,000 kilometres) of the Earth in early December this year. It is trailing behind...