Our solar system is full of some pretty odd things, as well as phenomena that are so stunning and beautiful it’s hard to even grasp. We’ll start close to home, though, just above the atmosphere in the ...

The sky of the planet Venus could soon be the scene of a meteor shower. This possibility stems from the study of two ...

Astronomers in the US and Europe have proved that sunlight plays a key role in how fast asteroids rotate. The rotation is caused by the small torque given to an asteroid when previously absorbed solar ...

Twoseparate asteroids have turnedthe Sun's rays into an engine of sorts,accelerating their spin rates by reflecting absorbed sunlight into space,according to a trio of new studies. Theasteroids, known ...

Sightseeing on its way to a comet, Europe's Rosetta spacecraft snapped pictures of an oddly shaped asteroid named Steins that turns out to be not a solid body, but a pile of rubble spun up, in part, ...

Asteroids are the small, tiny rocks that orbit the sun. Too small to be a planet (sorry!), too big to be a micrometeoroid. They were first spotted in the early 1800’s, when the largest of their number ...

The asteroid 6478 Gault is seen with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, showing two narrow, comet-like tails of debris that tell us that the asteroid is slowly undergoing self-destruction. The ...

The Yarkovsky-O’Keefe-Radzievskii-Paddack (YORP) effect is believed to alter the way small bodies in the solar system rotate. YORP is a torque due to sunlight shining on the surfaces of asteroids and ...

A phenomenon known as "YORP torque" is ripping an asteroid apart, and thanks to a team of telescopes, astronomers have been able to watch for the first time ever. Freelancer Michael Franco writes ...

Solar radiation pressure, specifically the Yarkovsky-O’Keefe-Radzievskii-Paddack (YORP) effect, has been identified as the mechanism responsible for creating and potentially destroying Trojan asteroid ...

If you think asteroids are just dead, uninteresting lumps of rocks, you’re very, very wrong. Besides being hugely diverse, capable of wiping out life on Earth, capable of bringing the constituents of ...