#meteorite

#meteorite

The Lyrids are caused by Earth passing through the dusty trail left by Comet C/1861 G1 Thatcher, a long-period comet that orbits the Sun roughly every 415 years.

"The worst place to live on Earth is actually the safest place to live on another planet," he adds.

Police in Koblenz said the impact involved a burned-out celestial object that crashed into the building, adding that firefighters and police were on site and that there was no ongoing danger. Emergency services reported a surge in calls as the meteor was seen across large parts of western Germany, including Rhineland-Palatinate, North Rhine-Westphalia, Hesse, Saarland, Baden-Wurttemberg and Lower Saxony.

The new work was less notable for showing that we had found these bases in Ryugu than for solving a previous mystery: earlier studies had failed to detect them there, despite their presence in many other asteroid samples.

Discovered in December 2024, asteroid 2024 YR4 was briefly considered the most dangerous asteroid in decades after scientists initially estimated it had a 3.1% chance of colliding with the Earth in 2032. Closer observations quickly ruled out a city killer scenario, but instead astronomers calculated there was a 4.3% chance that the moon lay in the path of impact.

Witnesses in Pittsburgh reported seeing what appeared to be a burning object streaking through the sky, describing it as 'a rocket or something like a meteor.' One local wrote online: '911 calls in the city. I have relatives who heard the boom from Hinckley, Ohio, all the way to Sandusky.'

We found that life is more likely to survive an asteroid impact, so it's definitely still a real possibility that life on Earth could have come from Mars. Maybe we're Martians! The idea that life could have spread through the solar system or even the universe on rocks is known as the lithopanspermia hypothesis.

Observations from the ALMA telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert show that the coma of this celestial object is heavily enriched in methanol, a type of alcohol common in fuels and solvents. Although methanol is commonly found in comets in the solar system, 3I/Atlas contained up to four times the typical amount.

Stellar activity such as solar storms and plasma turbulence from a star near a transmitting planet can broaden otherwise ultra-narrow signals. That spreads the power of any such transmission across more frequencies, the institute's scientists say, which makes it more difficult to detect using traditional narrowband searches.

Plenty of asteroids can survive their fiery plunge through the Earth's atmosphere. If they're big enough, they can prove incredibly destructive, like the 60-foot Chelyabinsk meteor that exploded over the southern Ural region in Russia in 2013, releasing a blast equivalent to 30 times the energy of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. And in case an even larger space rock were to ever threaten humanity, we'd have to get creative to keep it from colliding with our planet.

For example, reader David Erickson had this on his mind: If there were aliens 66 million light-years from Earth, how big a telescope would they need to see dinosaurs? Ha! I love this question. I've thought of it myself but never worked out the mathexcept to think, Probably pretty big, which turns out to dramatically underestimate the actual answer.