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This Hubble Space Telescope image of the asteroid Dimorphos was taken on December 19, 2022, nearly four months after the asteroid was impacted by NASA?s DART mission (Double Asteroid Redirection Test). Hubble?s sensitivity reveals a few dozen boulders knocked off the asteroid by the force of the collision. These are among the faintest objects Hubble has ever photographed inside the solar system. The free-flung boulders range in size from three feet to 22 feet across, based on Hubble photometry. They are drifting away from the asteroid at a little more than a half-mile per hour. The discovery yields invaluable insights into the behavior of a small asteroid when it is hit by a projectile for the purpose of altering its trajectory.

NASA's asteroid-smashing space debris spotted by Hubble telescope

20 July 2023

The Hubble Space Telescope has snapped the results of smashing a spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphous

Distant planet may be the first known to share its orbit with another

19 July 2023

Exoplanet PDS 70b, a gas giant seven times the mass of Jupiter, appears to share an orbit with a ball of dust around the mass of Earth's moon, which could be forming a new planet

Could we put out the sun with a sun-sized orb of water?

18 July 2023

What would happen if we pushed a sun-sized ball of water into our star? The Dead Planets Society podcast dives into the possibilities

The are thosands of small pieces of junk orbiting Earth (as well as thousands of satellites)

Quantum sensors could detect space debris from its gravitational pull

30 May 2023

Devices based on quantum properties of very cold and very small crystals could be mounted on satellites and sense space debris that could collide with them

Butterflies evolved 100 million years ago in North America

15 May 2023

Many researchers thought butterflies first evolved in Asia, but a global genetic analysis suggests they arose in North America, well before the non-avian dinosaurs went extinct

Absolutely enormous asteroid belt discovered around a nearby star

8 May 2023

Astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope to spot strange asteroid belts around the nearby star Fomalhaut, along with evidence for at least three planets

Samples from asteroid Ryugu contain one of the building blocks of RNA

21 March 2023

The Hayabusa 2 spacecraft brought back samples from Ryugu in 2020, and an analysis of a tiny portion of those samples has revealed key ingredients for life

Asteroids that speed up unexpectedly may be ‘dark comets’ in disguise

21 March 2023

Some asteroids appear to accelerate in ways that can’t be accounted for by gravity, suggesting they might be firing out invisible jets of gas - like those of comets

The evidence was found in a group of sedimentary and volcanic rocks in western Australia

Earliest evidence of a meteorite hitting Earth found in Australia

15 March 2023

Tiny pieces of stone found in a rock formation in Western Australia may be the oldest evidence of a meteorite impact on Earth, dating back nearly 3.5 billion years

Asteroid moonlet Dimorphos as seen by the DART spacecraft 11 seconds before impact. DART?s onboard DRACO imager captured this image from a distance of 42 miles (68 kilometers). This image was the last to contain all of Dimorphos in the field of view. Dimorphos is roughly 525 feet (160 meters) in length. Dimorphos? north is toward the top of the image. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL

What we learned from NASA's asteroid-smashing DART mission

1 March 2023

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test smashed into the asteroid Dimorphos in 2022, and the huge plume of rubble from the collision more than tripled the momentum transferred from the spacecraft to the asteroid