The pristine samples from asteroid Ryugu returned by the Hayabusa2 mission on December 6, 2020, have been vital to improving our understanding of primitive asteroids and the formation of the […]
A bombardment of comets is thought to have occurred in the inner solar system as a result of a dynamical instability among the giant planets after gas disk dispersal.
Impacts of interstellar dust (ISD) grains on the Ulysses spacecraft allowed for the first successful in situ measurement of ISD (Grün et al. 1993).
The analysis of biorelevant molecules in returned mission samples such as from the carbonaceous asteroid (162173) Ryugu is key to unravelling the role of extraterrestrial organics in the evolution of […]
A team of astronomers has made a groundbreaking discovery by detecting molecular activity in comet C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein)—the largest and second most distantly active comet ever observed from the Oort […]
We present results from an experimental study on the interaction of atomic deuterium with Mg-rich amorphous enstatite and forsterite type silicates. Infrared spectroscopy was used to examine the process.
Carbonaceous chondrite (CC) meteorites are fragments of planetesimals that hold clues about the early solar system’s organic matter. Amino acids are key to life on Earth; thus their study from […]
Potassium was first detected in spectra of the sungrazer comet Ikeya-Seki at the heliocentric distance rh = 0.15 au and, 48 years later, in comets PanSTARRS and ISON at rh […]
Understanding the origin of comets requires knowledge of how the Solar System formed from a cloud of dust and gas 4.567 Gyr ago.
The young β Pictoris system has been monitored with high-resolution optical spectrographs for decades. These observations have revealed strongly variable absorption in the Ca II H\&K lines attributed to in-falling […]
