Asteroids that orbit close to the Earth inevitably cause us some anxiety due to the even remote possibility of a collision. But their proximity also offers ample opportunities to learn more about the ...

Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt and the closest dwarf planet to Earth. Discovered in 1801 and visited by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft in 2015, it has changed how scientists think about ...

On January 1, 1801, a Sicilian astronomer named Giuseppe Piazzi discovered the dwarf planet Ceres orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter. At the time, Ceres was considered to be a planet. But after ...

NASA is monitoring an asteroid that's hurtling towards the Earth at more than 33,000 miles per hour, according to the space agency's Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS). Designated “2025 XN4, ...

This image presents a grid of color-enhanced astronomical observations, each depicting a circumstellar disc—structures of dust and gas surrounding stars. Every square in the grid represents a ...

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A new scientific study has revealed that the asteroid belt located between Mars and Jupiter is slowly disappearing. Researchers say the belt, which contains millions of rocky bodies, has been steadily ...

The asteroid designation of Ceres was not addressed and so it can be assumed that Ceres has dual classification: an asteroid and a dwarf planet. It should be noted that all of the dwarf planets have ...

A new analysis estimates that the asteroid belt is steadily losing mass each year, and may not be as permanent a feature of the solar system as we thought. When you purchase through links on our site, ...

The asteroid belt is found orbiting between Mars and Jupiter and is a vast collection of rocks that is thought to be a planet that never formed. When our solar system formed 4.6 billion years ago, the ...

More than 50 times further from the Sun than Earth, the tiny dwarf planet Makemake is one of the last places you'd expect to find an intact gaseous atmosphere. Not only is it incredibly cold, being ...

More than 2 billion kilometers farther from the sun than Pluto, a frigid world named Makemake sports the most distant gas ever seen in our solar system, new observations reveal. “By surprise, we found ...