Astro Blog

By Amanda Holpuch , The New York Times.  Excerpt: A couple in Canada were returning home from walking their dogs some months ago when they found a burst of dusty debris on their walkway. They turned to their security-camera footage for answers and found it showed a mysterious puff of smoke appearing on the tidy walkway where the mystery splotch was. The source of the splotch was officially registered  on Monday  as the Charlottetown meteorite, named after the city on Prince Edward Island, in eastern Canada, where it landed....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/16/science/meteorite-debris-security-camera-canada.html . [includes video of the camera] 

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/nov/16/meteorite-that-landed-in-cotswolds-may-solve-mystery-of-earths-water By  Hannah Devlin , The Guardian.  Excerpt: Water covers three-quarters of the Earth’s surface and was crucial for the emergence of life, but its origins have remained a subject of active debate among scientists. Now, a 4.6bn-year-old rock that crashed on to a  driveway in Gloucestershire last year  has provided some of the most compelling evidence to date that water arrived on Earth from asteroids in the outer solar system.... 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/02/us/meteor-explosion-pittsburgh.html By  Azi Paybarah , The New York Times.  Excerpt: For Heather Lin Ishler, the first morning of 2022 in Dormont, a neighborhood just south of downtown Pittsburgh, began like most days had in 2021. ...Then, the bed shook. “The sensation,” Ms. Ishler, 34, later said, “reminded me of fireworks” and how, if you stand too close, you can feel “a rumbling in your chest.” ...“It was just the feeling of the shock wave,” Ms. Ishler recalled, “but no sound or flash or anything like that.” ...Diane Turnshek, an astronomer who lectures at Carnegie Mellon University, felt something powerful on Saturday morning, too. She was in her home atop a Pittsburgh hill, 1,120 feet above sea level. Her initial thought was that her dryer had fallen off the washing machine in the room next door. Calls started coming into the Pittsburgh office of the National Weather Service from people who had heard “a really loud sound but didn’t see a...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/14/world/canada/meteorite-bed.html By  John Yoon  and  Vjosa Isai , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Ruth Hamilton was fast asleep in her home in British Columbia when she awoke to the sound of her dog barking, followed by “an explosion.” She jumped up and turned on the light, only to see a hole in the ceiling. Her clock said 11:35 p.m. ...“Oh, my gosh,” she recalled telling the operator, “there’s a rock in my bed.” A meteorite, she later learned. The 2.8-pound rock the size of a large man’s fist had barely missed Ms. Hamilton’s head, leaving “drywall debris all over my face,” she said. Her close encounter on the night of Oct. 3 left her rattled, but it  captivated the internet  and handed scientists an unusual chance to study a space rock that had crashed to Earth.…

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613060/theres-probably-another-planet-in-our-solar-system/ Source:   By MIT Technology Review. Excerpt: When it comes to exploring the solar system, astronomers have an embarrassing secret. Despite 400 years of stargazing, they have discovered only two large objects that would have been unknown to the ancients: Uranus in 1781 and Neptune in 1846. That’s not for lack of trying. The possibility of an unknown planet just beyond observational reach has attracted astronomers like moths to a flame. A few have been successful. Several astronomers together discovered Neptune after noticing that the other planets were being gravitationally nudged by an unknown mass. Neptune didn’t entirely resolve these discrepancies, and the hunt continued into the 20th century, culminating in Pluto’s discovery in 1930. But Pluto turned out to be so small that it couldn’t account for the nudging. Indeed, it was later humiliatingly demoted to a “dwarf planet.” ... ...

https://eos.org/articles/apollo-may-have-found-an-earth-meteorite-on-the-moon Source:   By Kimberly M. S. Cartier, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: The meteorite may have been blasted off of Earth during an impact, mixed with lunar rocks, and brought back to Earth 4 billion years later by astronauts. A rock sample brought back by Apollo 14 may contain the first evidence of Earth material on the Moon. New analysis of zircon grains in one lunar sample suggests that the zircon formed under conditions typical in Earth’s crust and not on the Moon. ...“I expect there could be a bit of controversy because this is the first of its kind,” [Jeremy] Bellucci said. “Hopefully,” he said, “it inspires a search for more Earth materials and further analyses on these samples.”...

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/18/science/diamonds-meteorite-lost-planet.html Source:   By Nicholas St. Fleur, The New York Times Excerpt: In 2008, chunks of space rock crashed in the deserts of Sudan. Diamonds discovered inside one of the recovered meteorites may have come from a destroyed planet that orbited our sun billions of years ago, scientists said on Tuesday. If confirmed, they say, it would be the first time anyone has recovered fragments from one of our solar system’s so-called “lost” planets. ... Dr. Gillet’s colleague Farhang Nabiei made the discovery while taking high-resolution images of a meteorite that had landed ...about a decade ago. The space rock is classified as ureilite, a type of rare meteorite that has embedded within it several different types of minerals. And inside this one, they found diamonds. The nano-sized gems were ...far from crystal clear. They were riddled with tiny imperfections, called inclusions, made of chromite, phosphate and iron-nicke...

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/03/surprising-meteorite-discovery-points-early-solar-system-chaos Source:   By Paul VoosenMar, Science. Excerpt: The stately solar system of today was in turmoil in its first several million years, theorists believe, with giant planets sowing chaos as they strayed far from their current orbits. But corroborating evidence has been thin—until now. Scientists have found a new window into the early dynamics: a curious chemical divide in the dozens of species of meteorites. ...in work presented last week at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference here, a group of German geochemists ...tested 32 meteorites representing nearly all known types and found that "any meteorite you take, it belongs to either one of these groups," says Thorsten Kleine, a geochemist at the University of Münster in Germany who led the work. Those divergent chemistries imply distinct origin stories for asteroids, the parent bodies of most meteorites. One group formed...

Source:   By Kenneth Chang, The New York Times Excerpt: ...one might think that meteorites that fall on Earth ought to be just like the asteroids that pass through Earth’s neighborhood. “That’s what everybody would have expected,” said Philipp R. Heck, the curator in charge for the meteorite and physical geology collections at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Planetary scientists were surprised almost a decade ago when they discovered that the most plentiful types of meteorites they had collected and studied on Earth were actually not common in space. In a paper published Monday by the journal Nature Astronomy, an international team of researchers led by Dr. Heck says it has uncovered part of the explanation. Mineralogical evidence in some meteorites had already pointed to a cataclysmic collision in the asteroid belt about 466 million years ago — long before dinosaurs, when multicellular animals were still fairly new. (Dr. Heck estimated that any skywatchers back...

Source:   By Paul Voosen, Science Excerpt: Some 3.8 billion years ago... A 930-kilometer-wide impact basin perched on the moon’s visible edge, [Mare] Orientale resembles a bull’s-eye, with a smooth interior encircled by three rough rings. ...Do any of the rings match the original crater rim left by the striking asteroid or comet? Now, a new subsurface moon map from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission, published today in Science, suggests that the answer is no. ...GRAIL’s two spacecraft...measured Orientale from a scant altitude of 2 kilometers. At such close range, the spacecraft were exceptionally sensitive to tiny changes in the moon’s gravity caused by buried rocks of different density–giving the GRAIL team a picture of the subsurface, and a better idea of how the impact actually went down. They found that the Orientale strike hollowed out a crater some 320 to 460 kilometers wide—smaller than any of the rings. Within an hour, the crater’s steep wa...

Try out this interactive simulation for Crater Impacts. Keywords: asteroid, crater, impact, meteoroid http://simulator.down2earth.eu/ 

Source:   NASA RELEASE 14-079 Excerpt: ...Scientists, using cameras aboard NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), have created the largest high resolution mosaic of our moon’s north polar region. The six-and-a-half feet (two-meters)-per-pixel images cover an area equal to more than one-quarter of the United States. ...The entire image measures 931,070 pixels square – nearly 867 billion pixels total. ...LRO entered lunar orbit in June 2009 equipped with seven instrument suites to map the surface, probe the radiation environment, investigate water and key mineral resources, and gather geological clues about the moon's evolution.... http://www.nasa.gov/press/2014/march/nasa-releases-first-interactive-mosaic-of-lunar-north-pole/#.UzYIUl5GLHQ

Source:  Jose Maria Madiedo and José Luis Ortiz,   University of Huelva and Andalusian Astrophysics Institute (respectively)    2014 Feb. Video on Youtube produced  on the occasion of the publication of a paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS) . http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=perqv4qByaI&feature=youtu.be

Source:   NASA RELEASE 13-120 Excerpt: ...NASA's Cassini spacecraft has provided the first direct evidence of small meteoroids breaking into streams of rubble and crashing into Saturn's rings. These observations make Saturn's rings the only location besides Earth, the moon, and Jupiter where scientists and amateur astronomers have been able to observe impacts as they occur.  ... Saturn's rings act as very effective detectors of many kinds of surrounding phenomena, including the interior structure of the planet and the orbits of its moons.  ... http://www.nasa.gov/cassini  http:// www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2013/apr/HQ_13-120_Saturn_Meteors.html