National Astronomy Meeting 2021: Media invitation

Around 850 astronomers and space scientists will gather online from 19 – 23 July, for the Royal Astronomical Society National Astronomy Meeting 2021 (NAM 2021) hosted by the University of Bath. Postponed in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the…

New telescope at ESO’s La Silla joins effort to protect Earth from risky asteroids

Part of the world-wide effort to scan and identify near-Earth objects, the European Space Agency’s Test-Bed Telescope 2 (TBT2), a technology demonstrator hosted at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile, has now started operating. Working alongside its northern-hemisphere partner telescope,…

More than 5,000 tons of extraterrestrial dust fall to Earth each year

Every year, our planet encounters dust from comets and asteroids. These interplanetary dust particles pass through our atmosphere and give rise to shooting stars. Some of them reach the ground in the form of micrometeorites. An international program conducted for…

Asteroid dust found in crater closes case of dinosaur extinction

Researchers believe they have closed the case of what killed the dinosaurs, definitively linking their extinction with an asteroid that slammed into Earth 66 million years ago by finding a key piece of evidence: asteroid dust inside the impact crater.…

NASA’s first mission to the Trojan asteroids integrates its second scientific instrument

NASA’s Lucy mission is one step closer to launch as L’TES, the Lucy Thermal Emission Spectrometer, has been successfully integrated on to the spacecraft. “Having two of the three instruments integrated onto the spacecraft is an exciting milestone,” said Donya…

A pair of lonely planet-like objects born like stars

Star-forming processes sometimes create mysterious astronomical objects called brown dwarfs, which are smaller and colder than stars, and can have masses and temperatures down to those of exoplanets in the most extreme cases. Just like stars, brown dwarfs often wander…