The 2023 perihelion passage of comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) afforded an opportunity to measure the abundances and spatial distributions of coma volatiles in an Oort cloud comet at high spatial […]
Amino acids, the building blocks necessary for life, were previously found in samples of 4.6-billion-year-old rocks from an asteroid called Bennu, delivered to Earth in 2023 by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission.
In this work, we explore several ways to detect possible exocomet transits in the TESS (The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) light curves. The first one has been presented in our […]
A Sydney PhD student has recreated a tiny piece of the Universe inside a bottle in her laboratory, producing cosmic dust from scratch. The results shed new light on how […]
The uneven detection of prebiotic organic compounds in meteorites—where amino acids and nucleobases are commonly identified but sugars remain rare and poorly characterized—limits our understanding of extraterrestrial organic chemistry.
Near-Earth objects (NEOs) are excellent laboratories for testing processes that affect airless bodies, as well as informing us about Solar System history.
Expanding human space exploration necessitates technologies for sustainable local resource acquisition, to overcome unviable resupply missions. Asteroids, some of which rich in metals like platinum group elements, are promising targets.
The environs of other stellar systems may be directly probed by analyzing the cometary activity of interstellar objects. The recently discovered interstellar object 3I/ATLAS was the subject of an intensive […]
While it has been long supposed that asteroids played a role in the delivery of important prebiotic compounds to early Earth, the exact nature of the interactions between asteroidal material […]
3I/ATLAS is an interstellar object whose activity provides critical insights into its composition and origin. However, due to its orbital geometry, the object is too close to the Sun near […]
